We all know more about how we should live our lives than we do in actuality, be it knowing not to eat fast food, drink the 6th cup of coffee or smoke that cigarette, we know almost for certain that such behaviours only cause pleasure in the short term but can, and usually do longterm harm to ourselves or even those around us.

Knowing does not equal doing, but feeling almost always leads to action. Because emotions are actions, physical states of our bodies (you can’t really feel sad while running a marathon) and while using facts to persuade someone may or may not be an efficient way of communication, if instead we use emotions, we have an incredibly higher chance of getting our point across. And who better to know the fine art of communicating emotions than us creatives?

An example I would like to share comes from old Yugoslavia, a country that, if you’re American, brought you one of the worst cars you could have owned in the 80s, the Yugo. My story though isn’t about a car, but about a seemingly mediocre poster that almost caused riots in the nation after its secret was uncovered.

It all began in 1987 with a nation-wide call for entries for artists to design an image that would be used as a promotion for the national Youth Day, specifically The Relay of Youth, a symbolic relay race held in Yugoslavia every year where young Yugoslavians would carry a baton thought all the states of the country with a birthday pledge to the country’s leader Josip Broz Tito (the glory of socialism).

One of the top candidates for the design was a poster depicting a muscular young man with a torch in his left hand and the national flag in his right, waving perfectly behind him in the wind. It was a magnificent poster, a statement to the strength of the country’s peoples and oversaturated with national symbolism (again, glorious socialism). So the decision to proclaim it a winer of the contest was almost unanimous. Were it not for one small issue.

After the poster had been published in the national newspaper to be shown to the people, a doctor found it oddly familiar and after double-checking fond that the poster was nothing more than a literal duplicate of a Nazi poster used to propagate the Hitler’s Youth program and that only the flag and national symbols had been changed by the group of artists responsible for the poster’s creation.

As one can imagine all hell broke loose and soon thereafter the poster was disqualified and the authors sanctioned. And all it took for the image to go from glorious masterpiece to disgusting filth was the succession of coloured stripes on the flag and the type of bird that was depicted sitting on the mast. Everything else was almost completely the same.

Even though there was nothing wrong with anything depicted on the poster, nothing wrong with its facts, the emotions it embodied because of its symbolical provenance were enough to disqualify it. Because many times the facts do not and will not matter; it does not matter if your portrait isn’t exactly like the person you are portraying, it doesn’t matter if your tone of red is the same as it is in reality or that the blue cobalt colour you used to paint the sea never really occurs in nature, if your art does not convey emotion first and facts second.

In the end it’s really not that hard to communicate facts, it just takes time to memorise them or learn them by heart or copy them some other way, but to communicate emotions, well, you can’t really learn something like this from a textbook and you surely can’t just copy paste an emotion onto your artwork and call it your own. In certain times one could even have ended up in jail for doing so.