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Vendor Power is a project by artist/designer Candy Chang, made in collaboration with The Street Vendor Project and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). This guide to street vending in NYC decodes the city’s cryptic volume of regulations through a series of illustrations. Rosten Woo from CUP notes, “we tried to create something that uses as little language as possible to spell out the most critical pieces of the code.”

Many vendors are being fined $1000 for little things like parking their cart too far away from the curb, not “conspicuously” wearing their vending license, and other rules buried in the City’s regulation book full of intimidating jargon that would make even the most patient person cry. This guide helps clarify the rules through diagrams and minimal text in English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish, so NYC’s diverse vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living.

Vendor Power is part of a series called Making Policy Public, which uses graphic design to explore and explain public policy. This is the beauty of design: a marriage of art and community needs. Thousands of copies were distributed to vendors this spring. Check out the research-and-design process via Urban Omnibus and click on the image above to download the poster.