This week the Nationalist opposition candidate, Karol Nawrocki, narrowly won Poland’s presidential election, with 50.89% of the vote in a runoff, “delivering a big blow to the centrist government’s efforts to cement Warsaw’s pro-European orientation,” reports Reuters.

But as art director, critic, and educator, Steven Heller, observes, while Poland now has a right-wing foothold of high rank, this was not always so.

In this essay he remembers that the transformation to a free Polish society began in 1980, when a peaceful revolution gnawed away at and brought down the Communist-led government. Solidarność, aka Solidarity, emerged as the first independent trade union in a Warsaw Pact country—and it was recognized by the state, complete with its veritably ad hoc logo that symbolized the national movement for societal change.

Designed by Jerzy Janiszewski, the logo hit the public eye with the persuasive allure and rallying force of Milton Glaser’s I [Heart] New York logo—but it was arguably more consequential given its social, political and cultural rebirth. The logo was originally produced as a poster for the surprise August 1980 Lenin Shipyard strike, and by 1981 it had become an international symbol of the dissolution of the Iron Curtain.

The Solidarity logo reminds us that graphic design, at its most potent, isn’t about decoration—it’s about declaration. This mark compresses moral clarity, cultural identity, and emotional urgency into a single visual gesture. The letterforms looked like people marching, shoulder to shoulder. It was visual rhetoric—a kind of street poetry in bold red ink—that told a whole nation: You are not alone.

This is where design transcends marketing and enters the realm of social force. As Heller has long argued, the most powerful graphics don’t sell a product—they signal belonging, ignite imagination, and call people to action. In Poland, this logo did all three. It stitched together disparate frustrations into a unified front, offering ordinary citizens an icon they could rally behind, literally and emotionally.

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