A while back, the Obama campaign hired Scott Hansen AKA “ISO50” to follow up Shephard Fairey’s PROGRESS print. The result was my gateway to the rest of Scott Hansen’s work: amazingly tactile, geometric, retro work combining natural media, Swiss layout sensibilities, late 90s futurism (a la Designer’s Republic), and the pop vernacular of 60s-70s music posters.
Two weeks ago I got a chance to try my hand at totally ripping off Mr Hansen. I was asked to do a poster advertising Common Ground’s involvement with the Building Project, to be posted on our building site for the next two years. (The 2008, ‘09, and ‘10 BPs are going to be next to each other.)
Whenever I design anything my first reaction is to go for the heroic, which is why—until recently—a lot of my buildings were either very long or very tall. In addition to ISO50, I looked at Works Progress Administration and Soviet Constructivist graphic design—they all have in common lots of bold, carefully calculated geometric shapes, solidly anchored typography, dramatic angles, and strong colors.
As far as graphic design goes I’ve always considered my lack of illustration ability to be a weakness—luckily, over the years my crutches have gotten better. I modeled the raw geometry in Rhino, adjusted the virtual camera to 25mm, and exported a 2D Illustrator file, where I adjusted colors, gradients, and typography.
Next I brought my Illustrator work into Photoshop, where I started applying textures to the objects and to the foreground/background. I made a circular array of squares and applied that to the background to get some more dimension out of it.
I brought my poster to site the next day, where it was promptly rejected for being, basically, too cool, and also for its overly BP House-centric focus—turns out they wanted a more “community”-ish design, meaning less imposing and more contextual. Read the brief carefully, kids.
I went back to the drawing board with a couple of new challenges: the aforementioned context, adding a map, and—worse of all—use the Common Ground logo as the main title. (As you can see from their webpage, the Common Ground logo is fresh out of Word.)
I made this one after getting only three hours of sleep—my client, uh, conveyed the urgency of the situation—and after a while I got sort of delirious. When evaluating my own designs I always leave the final word to gut reaction, and my gut was telling me this one was very very bad. I shopped it around my friends and got a couple of responses: “fall collection,” “New Years’ bash,” “leaves?” etc. Some of them mentioned that there were serious hierarchy/perspective problems, which got my subconscious thinking while my conscious passed out.
The next morning I work up at 4 AM and couldn’t stop thinking about the damn poster. I got out of bed and hiked over to studio at 5 in the morning and started ripping out layers, gutting the crap, completely determined to save my design. I put everything on a white background and saved the basic geometry, and incinerated everything else. I added a dash of McSweeney’s and a whole lot of The Very Hungry Caterpillar (not on purpose)—thus was born the final print.
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