Existential Horror Time with Me & Mitski

Plants plants plants!!! (and some posters)

I always have trouble picking inspirational quotes when asked to do so--I think I just have a lot of trouble condensing writing I like into a couple lines, and I'm also a bit too picky (some might say too pretentious) when it comes to pithy statements. Because of this, I picked a bit of a downer, but it's one I like a lot: the opening lines to Mitski's "Me and My Husband."

I had a couple different ideas of where to present the posters. My original idea was to separate them into three different spaces: the black and green one in the elevator, the blue one in the kitchen, and the yellow one in one of the bathrooms. I wanted to do this because they're all liminal spaces--transient, just like the quote suggests life is. I realized, though, that it would have been kind of annoying for everyone to have to hunt down the posters in three different places, especially since one would be constantly moving, and another would be in a space that might have been in use. It also may have inconvenienced people who actually needed to use them, so I scrapped that idea in favor of placing the posters in the room with the plants with it. This had the added effect of letting me play with placement in the windows, and it let me think about how the light might reflect on the images, as well as how the plants could interact with the images. It also brought some extra symbolism to the life/death dualism in the quote. For one, plants are a tangible symbol of life and its fragility. For another, the fact that you had to stand on the transparent overhang to look at the posters makes you briefly contemplate your own mortality. Finally, the overlap of the plant onto the large poster literally makes that part of the poster "nothing forever." There's something apocalyptic about that image: it's as if the posters are relics of a lost time, and the plants have grown up around them and overtaken them.

"Zine" design; 8.5"x11"

The yellow design was the first one I did. For it, I was looking to incorporate bright colors and bold, eye-catching text. I wanted it to look bright and bold because that's what the song sounds like--synth brass, a jaunty piano riff, a danceable beat. I don't have sound-color synesthesia, but if I did, the sunny yellow/orange in the background is how I imagine this song would look. I ended up with a design that looks very zine-like (or, at least, my understanding of what a zine may look like based on glimpses of online zines I saw as a teenager on Tumblr). There's a sense of balance to it because of the alignment of the text. The top couple lines are left-aligned, the middle four are centered, and the last two are right-aligned. It is a little bit unbalanced because of the exclamation-point-rectangle in the corner, but I think that also adds some needed contrast. The dark orange of the rectangle also provides a nice contrast to the rest of the poster; the different font does the same. I tried to evoke proximity by messing with the leading to make each pair of lines overlap just a little bit--which also added to the zine feel. I thought a little about white space when constructing the rectangle--I felt like there was too much empty space on at the bottom to just leave it blank, but I also didn't want to cover the entire bottom part with shape, because I felt it would look too much like a border. I think what I ended up with was a pretty good compromise--and also utilizes the element of repetition, via the repetition of the exclamation points in close proximity.

"Hourglass" design; 11"x17"

For the next poster, I wanted to lean into doing a grid design, while still incorporating some color. There's a sense of balance despite the disjointed nature of the image because the font on the left feels "heavier" than the font on the right, because it's bigger, a darker color, and in bold rather than italic. The proximity of one block of text to the other, as they are diagonal from each other, makes it easier to flow from the left to the right. There's contrast between the two because the left side is all the same color, while the right side is a gradient, with the color saturation gradually decreased; the two sides are also different fonts. There's a lot of white space in this design, but it makes the grid even easier to see, which also helps with readability. I also realized, after formatting the text box on the right, that it forms an hourglass--which evokes the passage of time, an idea central to the quote.

"Subway map" design; 18"x24"

For my last poster, I wanted to do something that I could knock out relatively quickly, but still something that would look bold and would mesh well with my other designs. I decided to do this spiral staircase-looking design after messing around a little with the alignment right and left text boxes and realizing that the most readable way to do a zig-zag pattern of text would be to get each side aligned as together as possible. The poster is balanced as it has a word on each side, but it is slightly askew, as the words on the right tended to be longer. There is a sense of repetition because of the constant zig-zag of the words, as well as the uniform font. The change in color for the last bit of the quote provides the contrast. White space is utilized through the differing distribution of negative space in the design, which was a result of using words of varying lengths and making the choice to not change the kerning to make them uniform. I realized after finishing it that the zig-zag and the use of negative space kind of makes it look like a subway map--different parts branching off of one main line. 

With this project, nothing, from the posters to the presentation, ended up the way I originally envisioned it, but I'm still really happy with the final product. I'm new to this medium, so I had to do a lot of experimenting: moving text, messing with leading, kerning, and fonts, and trying to create different shapes out of text. The end result, though, is that I have much better knowledge of Photoshop, and I have a much better sense of how I can use text alone to create a unified, balanced image.