Election! Britain Votes at the People's History Museum

• I recently visited the 'Election! Britain Votes' exhibition at the People's History Museum in Salford, Greater Manchester.

• The exhibition highlighted 100 years of election campaigning posters from 1900 to 2010 as well as documenting the ephemera from the 2015 election.

• I visited with a group of visually impaired and blind people for an accessible visit so we had an audio description session of the posters and a historical background session in regards to who won the elections and how the posters were received at the time.

• Another interesting dimension to the visit was a huge gallery space of wall-sized interactive infographics - detailing how to vote, who can vote, forms of government, our system, the counting process and election night.

• A multicoloured line chart bordered the bottom of the walls depicting the popularity of the parties in the past century - showing the rise in Labour and the fall of the Liberals. They were the most popular in 1900 so it was fascinating to see, in context, how people began to respond more to Labour and their output for the everyman and the hard worker.

• Observing the growth of the political poster and what it can mean, I looked at the slogans and imagery emblazoned across all kinds of ephemera - the marketing strategies have remained very much the same over the past 100 years! Belittling other parties policies, depicting them as caricatures, scary characters, toxic and poisonous... to front page newspapers reporting scandals and commenting on someone's intelligence.

• I learned that the Queen can vote (though she tends not to so as to stay neutral) MPs can vote (and they do, usually for themselves!) and homeless people can vote. Nice!

• The replica of the famous number 10 door was my favourite! There was a prop box to dress up and have your picture taken so I decided to wear a St. Trinian's-style hat and a sash stating 'votes for women'.

Getting back to COP though, the evolution of illustrative and graphic design styles on the election posters had me reflecting a lot on how styles and trends change and how it impacts on effectively communicating a message THROUGH choice of medium. The infographics also had the cogs in my head turning! Using simple shapes and forms with flat expanses of colour made it very easy to understand the wall-length flow chart regardless of your age, reading ability and even sight (I was with elderly partially sighted people who understood how to read it). Simple vectors are legible and inclusive to all and this is something I want to consider for my visual journal. Could I retell the 'Fight the Nothingness' poster through vector shapes in Illustrator?