“Trump 24K Gold-Plated” [Foil Stamping]

We issued our now notorious “Trump 24K Gold-Plated” and “Trump 14K Gold-Plated” posters in September, 2016 as a warning—two months before the November 6 U.S. presidential election.

Inspired by Jesse Reed and Michael Bierut’s design of an official H monogram for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, we created an unauthorized campaign poster for Donald J. Trump. Whereas Hillary’s “H” pulls one’s eye to the letterform itself, the narrative implicit in our design requires the viewer’s gaze to oscillate between foreground and background; between typographic form and counter-form.

Four gold, rotating letter Ts project qualities associated with Trump, among them luxury and wealth. The counter-form suggests a conflicting narrative, however: namely, that Donald Trump’s disruptive and divisive rhetoric is creating metaphoric negative spaces in the fabric of American society. These spaces—fracture lines, really—snake through the design’s square silhouette to reveal a swastika. And while the swastika is historically a symbol of dynamism and cyclical renewal associated with the sun, in this context the symbol evokes hate speech and white nationalist demagoguery.

Let’s be clear: for some Americans the attractive aspects of Donald Trump’s public persona can obscure his repellent views. The tension in our design between positive and negative space—between luxe gold foil letters and the matte black swastika—is meant to mirror this dualism. Ultimately, however, our design seeks to reveal the ugliness of Donald Trump’s world view.

We originally offered this poster in exchange for a donation to the ACLU or Planned Parenthood.

COLLECTIONS

• Letterform Archive, San Francisco
• Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
• Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
• Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
• Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
• Poster Museum at Wilanów, Warsaw
• Mark and Maura Resnick, Los Angeles
• Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
• Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London
• Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives, Visual Arts Foundation,
New York (Design of Dissent Collection)

EXHIBITIONS

• “Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest” (2022)
Letterform Archive, San Francisco

• “Protest! Resistance Posters” (2018)
Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich

• “Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–2018”
Design Museum, London

• “Believe The Hype: Propaganda, The Internet, and New Activisms” (2017)
B4BEL4B Gallery, Oakland

• “The Design of Dissent” (2017–2019)
Casa del Lago, Mexico City
Mad(e) in Romania Festival, Timisoara; Graphic Matters Festival, Breda;
Romanian Design Week Festival, Bucharest

• “TDC63, the 63rd annual competition of the Type Directors Club” (2017–2018)
Various venues throughout the United States, China, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

PUBLICATIONS

• (Forthcoming)
“The Visual Language of Political Illustration” by Catherine A. Moore and Megan Hauser, published by Bloomsbury Publishing (2025)

• “Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest” by Silas Munro and Stephen Coles, published by Letterform Archive (2022)

• “The Design of Dissent, Expanded Edition” by Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic, published by Rockport Publishers (2017)

• Communication Arts Design Annual 58 (2017)

• Communication Arts Typography Annual 7 (2017)

• “Typography 38: The Annual of the Type Directors Club” published by Verlag Hermann Schmidt (2017)

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EDITION: 35 signed and numbered; 73 unsigned; 2 artists’ proofs

INSCRIBED VERSION: Of the total edition, some of the unsigned posters were inscribed with the following handwritten text: “DESIGNISPLAY.COM/NO TRUMP” and “@DESIGN_IS_PLAY.” (See last image.)

DIMENSIONS: 18.75 x 22.5 inches
MEDIA: Gold foil stamped with registered embossing on #130 Classic Crest Smooth Epic Black Cover

PRINTING: Oscar Printing / San Francisco
DESIGN: © 2016 Mark Fox and Angie Wang / Design is Play / San Francisco

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Domestic shipping (USA only) is free via USPS or UPS Ground. Please allow 2–3 weeks for delivery. For international shipping, please inquire.