Essay #4 Part #3: Graphic Design

Graphic design is a task that requires sauce. Some people just don’t understand it, others have a blessing. I don’t know how much of it I have. I’m definitely not locked out of the tower but do I have the strength to climb?

Here is the most recent recruitment poster I worked on for TFR. It's for semi-public display on the TVs around the engineering building. I inherited the background from somebody else. I just did the typography. They tend to go with a ‘sleek, badass, performance, Jeremy Clarkson gets romantic about cars’ kind of vibe. My personal style at the moment leans “traditional formal print, I’m literally part of an academic cannon, stop standing so close to me.” This design is legible, balanced, neutral and inviting. The car stuff becomes safe and nurturing.

I admit the original design had more of a collage, mixed-and-spliced construction that's not a style I’m great with. Maybe they tend to go that way just because that's the sort of default workflow of something like photoshop; this is the era of the symbol particle collider. The big helmet guy could either use some more company or the whole image goes simpler but now we’re stuck between worlds.

If I were to redesign this, I would be less scared of breaking the natural geometry I assumed text was supposed to have. The TFR logo is rad, but I left it buried in the corner like a water mark out of convention. It deserves to be part of the foreground. I centered everything too geometrically. Text looks most beautiful when draped without devotion to the shape of the page. Here are some mockup concepts I made before learning those lessons.

This one was kind of a trial of brand fonts and colors and stuff. It's so honest and direct. It’s like ‘I want you’ if uncle sam was sick of everyone’s shit. It's a little funny if maybe sad or rude. In the process of making these earlier designs I got visibly better so I would probably nudge the text around a little bit.

This one is the north face supreme Goku with drip puffer. This goes crazy hard if you don’t think of it as derivative hack work. They like to include the complete list of ten sub clubs to show legitimacy, variety and strength, so here I played with that as a typographic texture of endless casual opportunity. There is a change where I replace most of the text in the box with “all majors needed” to keep it even more casual and vigorous. The school promotes the hell out of the car club, we don’t need to explain what it is. Though maybe we shouldn't take that too far and be smug about it.

I retooled the supreme logo design just for the marketing department where the smugness fits best. There’s something viciously harsh about that red box that might be a legibility problem.

That is actually about all my work at the moment. If you know me, I may be willing to do some favors at the moment (résumés, zine typography, thumbnails etc.) so long as you are willing to accept very opinionated designs and maybe me using the stuff for content. But don’t ask me on instagram. I have a thing there with Jesus.