WOODBURY UNIVERSITY : Student Artworks Target Graffiti

Tired of spending $3 million a year to clean up graffiti? The city of Los Angeles has recruited college students to lend a hand in the war against graffiti with a little artwork of their own.

Operation Clean Sweep, a city service that responds to residents’ complaints about graffiti, recently requested graphic arts and advertising design students at Woodbury University in Burbank and Cal State Northridge to design billboards as part of a new anti-graffiti campaign.

Woodbury students were asked to convey a law enforcement message, while CSUN students were instructed to promote community involvement.

“We feel the public information and education campaign . . . is something that needs to be tried as part of the arsenal in the war against graffiti,” said Delphia Jones, director of Operation Clean Sweep. “We thought we’d go to the colleges because they have young and creative minds and their age group is close to the primary perpetrators.”

In lieu of pay, Operation Clean Sweep has offered to place students’ names on the billboards if their design is chosen.

For many students, that was incentive enough. For others, the billboard campaign was an opportunity to send a message to the “taggers,” the vandals who try to gain fame by spray-painting their names everywhere they can.

Manuel Perez, 21, a Woodbury student who grew up in East Los Angeles surrounded by what he called “annoying graffiti,” designed a billboard warning graffiti vandals that police will be a constant annoyance to them.

“A lot of tagging is for fame. But they want to be famous among themselves, not among the police,” Perez said.

Stephen Dombrowski, 21, another Woodbury student, also made the billboard campaign a personal issue. His family’s flower shop near Inglewood is continually plagued by graffiti, he said.

“It’s removed daily,” he said. “It’s kind of disheartening when you get there in the morning and see it.”

Dombrowski said graffiti is the same kind of blight on society as drug use, a concept he incorporated into his billboard design.

The first designs, created by about 20 Woodbury students, were delivered to Jones last week. She expects to receive the CSUN designs next week.

All of the designs will be shown to prospective sponsors, who will choose one for their billboard.

Operation Clean Sweep, which has a budget of $10,000 for the project, will also rent some billboards.

In all, Jones expects about 20 billboards to be used in the citywide campaign, beginning in the spring.

Jones said that based on many of the signs she has seen so far, students will get their message across. “The results that we have gotten back so far are superior than we would have gotten from a public relations firm.”