While exploring ideas and themes for a thesis, I entertained the idea of designing a poster per day over a period of time. I designed fourteen posters in fourteen days. The content of the posters were based on some of my writings or based on personal experiences throughout the day. The intention was to not fully resolve a poster design every day, but to reflect upon a period of time in my life and record that in the form of a visual diary, which in turn, became a series of posters. Not every poster was resolved within a twenty-four hour period. I allowed myself to go back and modify some designs within the two-week working period, but upon the end of the fourteen day period, all work on the posters was to stop.
Poster design based on ‘Moments’ essay
Poster design based on ‘Afternoon Newspaper’ essay which was also used for thesis project
I Had to Do Some Coding. I was working on a freelance project which were a couple of websites. During this time I was consistently coding and developing the sites. While writing code and matching the designs intent, I can get lost in the lines and lines of code. There is something refreshing about the hand-drawn elements representing this analytical work against some of the typeset elements. By working white on black, there came about a feeling of writing on a chalkboard, which is further removed from the coding environment, but also has qualities of the temporary and movable elements needed while creating user interfaces.
Shootings in America. The Uvalde mass shooting happened while I was working on these poster designs. It seems to me that the amount of mass shootings in the United States has such frequency to them that our children, our statistics, and the amount of our armament have become a jumbled mess of imagery. The graph displays the number of mass shooting incidents over the past twenty years.
Parable of the Poisoned Arrow. After the Uvalde mass shooting, I was reading many articles and opinions on the gun culture of the United States. One article referenced this parable from Buddhism. Briefly, it reads as such: … a man was wounded with a poisonous arrow. His friends, companions, kinsmen & relatives wanted to provide him with a surgeon, and the man responded saying, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.… until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short man… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… whether the bow which loosed the arrow was a longbow… a crossbow… was made of fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… whether the shaft of the arrow was made of materials that were wild or cultivated… The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.
Grey The day I designed this poster was simply a gray day. It puts together some poetry and moments I wrote down and married them with a photo I had taken.
Bethlehem Steel. I had been writing series of stories and one of those stories was from my childhood days living in the shadow of the Bethlehem Steel Company while growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
