Critical Daily    Critical practice in graphic design

Started as a political printed newspaper, it is now an online project/archive that exists as a support mechanism for Occupy Design. Occupy Design was originally a part of the Occupy movement, and it created a base for freely available visual tools designed around a common graphic language to unite the 99%.

The paper was founded during the first week of the Occupy protests in London, in October 2011. It was founded by graphic designer Tzortzis Rallis. Just nine days after the occupation began, on 24th October, the first issue was published. The first issue was consisted of 2000 copies of 12 A4-size pages. After that, a dedicated team in the tent in front of the London’s St. Paul Cathedral published an issue every week. For the next 6 weeks, the paper was published in A4 size, but over the time it gradually grew to A3, and later to proper sized publication. Currently,  the paper exists as an online archive. Until it ceased publication 2017, it was printed every quarter or so.

Even though it started as a part of the Occupy Movement, later the paper became more independent. It only depended on donations for funding.

The paper collected texts from a variety of contributors. The articles in the magazine reacted to political, socio-economical, gender, cultural, and/or ecological problems. It also tried to inform its readers about various critical art or design projects. In 2016, an article in Migration Maps by Group 848 was published. In it,  they sketched maps of how people traveled from their home to the asylum centers. They wanted to accurately show their routes, and thus draw attention to Europe’s inhumane asylum policy.

It is important that designers not only work on projects that are critical. It's important that they also actively work on newspapers or webpages to collect these projects, data, and information, and let wider audiences see them. Sometimes, the data or information in a paper can be overwhelming for people, and they can get overwhelmed by the language in the text as it is written. Visual aids can help people to clearly understand the data.