Nadia Plesner

Today in our Design Studies lecture was about Good Design Bad Design, Jonathan Baldwin talked through a number of different things along with visual literacy but when he discussed Nadia Plesner it really stuck out to me. She designed a t-shirt with the image of a darfurian child who was holding Chihuahua and on the other arm he had a Louis Vuitton bag. The issue raised behind this top was that people focus on such meaningless things such as a bag compared to major issues across the world. After hearing about this story in the lecture I researched it a bit further to find out certain details on it.

Once the campaign started she got a copyright lawsuit from Louis Vuitton saying that the each day she continued to use this image she would be charged $20,000.


When I first heard this I was in shock that they would do this and on such a large extent, as for a student or most people $20,000 is a lot of money to spend on a campaign. The image on the bag I felt was a good way to raise attention that there are much more important things happening around the world at this time. If I had done this myself I would never have considered that it would be going against the law.


Jonathan had said that they can’t be picking in what copyrights they let slide n which they don’t. Even if the Louis Vuitton thought it wasn’t that a major breach of copyright they had to use a lawsuit other wise it could lead others to do the same thing.


Although this may be true I still think that a campaign like this is a lot more important to raise awareness than for the sake of someone breaching a copyright in a small way.