<p>The format for the Little Poster Festival is an Illustration Pedagogy take on what is essentially an academic poster. However, we want our students to think about approaching these posters as if they were a commission from a client - to convey ‘big ideas’, making them both academic and visually exciting. This includes encouraging students to see writing not as something additional or removed from their work – e.g. the theory element they have to do – but rather as something in which they can explicate their ideas and beliefs, described through image and text. Illustrators have more and more entered the fray as commentators intent on engaging in the big debates of the day, using words and images to speak the language of a world increasingly made of signs and spectacle. Through drawing + writing, making + thinking, we are challenging the existing orthodoxy of the supremacy and essentialism of the word in the understanding of critical debate.</p>