Zen and the Art of Poster Design

Earlier this year, I made the decision to start making art for myself again.

It wasn’t a decision I came to right away. For the three years prior, I had been rediscovering what it looked like to be creative outside of my professional work. It was a journey that was very much about the journey. The kind with a definitive start but no real idea of where you’re headed, no obvious destination. Narratively speaking, those are the best kind of journeys. Apart from the ones where you make friends along the way. Oh, or ones with orcs. Those are great, too.

The definitive start to my journey was miniature painting. It was a creative outlet that was as far removed from my professional work as possible. After all, if I was spending fifty plus hours a week directing art and designing graphics, more of the same after hours wasn’t going to reinvigorate things for me creatively. Miniature painting was different enough to keep me engaged, and rewarding enough to keep me motivated. It’s a hobby that quickly became a critical part of my creative life. At some point, I’ll write a post all about my experiences with the hobby, but for now what matters is that this is where things started. We have our ring. The fellowship is all here. We’re off to Mount Doom.

It was easy to anticipate becoming invested in miniature painting. Even before I started, I knew it was a methodical hobby that rewarded patience, precision, and attention to detail. My creativity thrives in that kind of environment, so it was the perfect fit for someone looking to redefine the terms of how they’re creative. What I didn’t anticipate was becoming invested in the hobby’s community. Prior to miniature painting, my experience with social media was relatively narrow. Instagram was a place to keep up with a few friends, colleagues, and irregularly share professional work. YouTube was for movie trailers and video game reviews. And my Facebook and Twitter accounts were abandoned not long after I was out of grad school. For most of my adult life, I was just barely on social media, and despite being a professional designer, I had never really invested in a creative community online. Miniature painting changed that for two reasons.

The first, and most obvious, was that I had no idea what I was doing. I knew how to paint and how to build a model kit for the most part, but miniature painting was this whole new world filled with its own techniques, terminology, and best practices. I needed guides through this world. Folks with the experience, patience, and skills to help me get started. Gandalfs to point me in the right direction. Thankfully, the hobby community on Instagram and YouTube proved to be a deep well of information and support. When I needed to know how texture paints work, or how to take care of my brushes, or how to fill gaps in a miniature, the community was there to be my guide. It was a near infinite resource of information and support that only required my engagement, my participation in its vast ecosystem. So, I did. I created an Instagram account just for my miniature painting. I shared my work, followed creators, and commented my support as often as possible. Like. Subscribe. Repeat. Inevitably, practicing the hobby and participating in the hobby community became symbiotically linked. The more I painted, the more I wanted to see what other people were creating, and vice versa. I couldn’t have one without the other.

The second reason I became invested in the hobby community was a matter of timing. It was the pandemic. The very start of it, actually. Like a lot of other people, I was on social media almost constantly. Filling time. Doom scrolling. Staring into the void. I was just starting my journey as a miniature painter, so the hobby community was eventually where I would find myself whenever I was online. The more time I spent viewing tutorials and scrolling through posts from other creators, the more engaged I became. My following list on Instagram grew every day. I started subscribing to channel after channel on YouTube. I backed crowdfunding projects from independent creators and joined Patreon to support my favorite hobbyists and crafters. I looked forward to new YouTube episodes every week with the same anticipation as you would some hit television show. The hobby community was a reprieve from a world that was becoming increasingly hostile and overwhelming. It fed my creativity rather than devouring it. And it wasn’t just me. There were a lot of folks who found their way to the hobby during the pandemic. It made the whole community feel more inviting, as though it was some new chapter in the history of the hobby and we were all a part of it. Some folks needed the escape the community offered, the shared experience and connectivity. Others, their jobs wiped out by the pandemic and corporate indifference, needed the income that being a content creator afforded. For a lot of people in the community, it wasn’t just a hobby, it was a lifeline. At a certain point, not being a part of all that didn’t feel like an option.

As time went on, my online community slowly began to expand. Now, I won’t labor for long over how the algorithm and my scrolling habits reshaped my social media experience. It’s one of those deeply dystopian things that everyone reading this will understand immediately. Interact with something on your phone, or say something within earshot of your Alexa, and get ready to be served ads and social accounts related to that thing for weeks. Just like Jesus, the Founding Fathers, and Walt Disney intended. So, with time, I began to see more graphic art and design creep into my social feed. I’d click on a post from Mindwork Games, and that would lead to a painting by Gerald Brom, and then a poster design for a heavy metal band, and so on. More and more, my feed was becoming creatively diverse. A cacophony of miniature painting, illustration, designers, and graphic artists. And more and more, I was beginning to feel like I wasn’t doing enough. I had reignited my desire to create for myself through miniature painting, and now I wanted to do more. When I started out on this journey, I had never intended to eventually make art like I am now. I was just going to paint little plastic space marines and be creative within the confines of a hobby that was far away from my professional work. But the more work I saw from other graphic artists, illustrators, and designers, the more the FOMO crept in and took root. As last year came to a close, I had decided I was going to do it. I was going to start making my own art again.

To be fair, I never really stopped. Miniature painting was my own art, after all. But the kind of art making I wanted to do now was different because it would be pulling from the same creative well that my professional work did. I wasn’t entirely certain that I’d be able to manage doing both. The fear of burning myself out was very real. But this was a unique moment in my creative life where my passion, desire, bandwidth, and skills were all converging and my most daunting fear was that if I didn’t take advantage of this moment, I’d regret it.

So, there I was, a new year and a fresh notebook slowly being filled with concepts and sketches. Very early on I had settled on posters as my preferred format for creating art again. Poster design, in all its various forms, has always been one of my favorite design formats. So much of the artwork that was inspiring me on social media was poster art, so at the very least it felt like a solid place to start. Ultimately, the poster format was just a framework, a set of boundaries. It allowed me to have a consistent form to create within, while allowing the content of the art itself to vary as wildly as I wanted. On the technical side, the poster format would allow me to create art that would display well on Instagram and then translate directly to print without alteration. Two birds. One stone.

I spent a couple of months sketching out concepts for poster designs, grouping together ideas, and trying to carve out exactly how I would approach this whole endeavor. For a while, I had been seeing a lot of graphic artists on Instagram who would design a series of posters. These were usually designs posted daily that centered around a specific theme, style, or prompt that they would iterate on for a month or longer. While I couldn’t manage something that industrious, I really liked the overall idea, so I settled on that approach. Creating a series of poster designs wrapped around a central theme felt like the most rewarding approach creatively. It gave me the flexibility to fully explore an idea across multiple pieces, while also providing some boundaries that would keep me grounded and focused. More importantly, I could bounce back and forth between series as often as I wanted. If I had exhausted an idea creatively, I could just move on to a different series, and then return whenever the inspiration hit. There was no pressure to make a certain kind of design that way. Giving myself the flexibility to make what I wanted, when I wanted, was the only way I could see to drive the whole process.

When it came to the style of the work, I tried not to set any boundaries, but I also knew early on that I would focus on typography and collage designs. Creating typography layouts and experimenting with type is one of my favorite things to do as a designer, and the possibilities are pretty much endless. Collage was something I had experimented with in art school, and whenever I had the chance to utilize it in my professional work, I did. The process of building a collage is much more organic than graphic design typically is for me, which is probably why I’m drawn to it. It’s a break from my usual way of working and allows me the flexibility to experiment and be surprised. There’s a depth to collages that I really enjoy as well. Not that every piece is like this, but there is something satisfying about focusing in on a collage, identifying the individual pieces, and then zooming back out to see how they all work together. It’s harmonic chaos.

Most of my early poster ideas were fairly safe, and pretty familiar to the kind of work I was already doing professionally. I revisited unused concepts for the Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel cover, reformatted them for posters, and then started to expand on them. I mocked up ideas for a series of posters based on 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World. I haven’t published any of these series yet, but they were foundational in helping me begin to define the kind of art I wanted to be making. I wanted to make art that was engaging and satisfying, but I also wanted to be saying something.

And here’s where we digress briefly. While I was redefining my creative life during the pandemic, I was also redefining my views on the world around me. I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole here, this is about poster design after all, but it’s fair to say the pandemic helped me better define some beliefs that had been steadily forming over the previous ten or so years. With that definition came frustration and mental unrest. I wanted to use my art to work through some of these frustrations, and maybe in the process, express some thoughts that would resonate with other people and validate the ways they were feeling. Not to get too far into the weeds here, but one of the most valuable parts of making and experiencing art is its ability to make you feel connected to something, an acknowledgement that you are not alone. I can’t say whether the art I’ve started to make is accomplishing this, but it is absolutely a fundamental part of what is driving it.

So, with all of these motivations itching around my brain, and a notebook filling with ideas, I began putting pixel to canvas. I created a template for my posters with a simple footer design to give everything just enough consistency. It was something I had seen other artists do, and it felt like the right way to unify and brand my work. Even at this early stage, I wanted to balance structure with creativity. The idea was that if I defined the tools I would use along this journey, then it would grant me the freedom to traverse the path ahead with relative ease, regardless of where it led or how often it branched and split. I setup folders for a dozen poster series I was planning, and then populated them with numbered copies of my template. Into each template I dropped a few words of direction or a stock photo to mark my intention. I was standing from a vantage point and defining points of interest on a world map. I knew I would never get to all of them, but I didn’t want to lose track of any ideas, any of the destinations I wanted to explore. I outfitted myself with new fonts from Envato, stock photos from Unsplash, collage materials from Creative Market, and my own library of illustrations, found objects, and texture scans that I had been gathering since art school. All of this preparation made what I was doing feel real and gave me the confidence to keep going. I wasn’t out of the Shire just yet, but I was well on my way.

The first pieces I created and finished were for my Slaughterhouse-Five series, The Children’s Crusade. Taking unused concepts from the graphic novel and redefining them in the context of a poster was a challenge, but it allowed me to really dig into the nuances of how I was laying out my type, which proved to be pretty rewarding. With a few posters in that series completed, I focused on some designs for what would eventually become my Amalgam series. My plan early on was to share a new poster design every week, and then maybe take every fifth or sixth week off. I was in no rush to start sharing my work, but I knew that once I started posting, I wanted to keep up the pace. I didn’t want this to be a phase, something I did intensely for a month or two and then nothing. This was going to be a new normal. So, I paced myself. I steadily created one poster, and then another. And then, the Superman image dropped.

Now, I had never intended to create art for a specific moment. I have no issue being explicit or heavy-handed in my work, but reacting to a moment in time comes with a lot of pitfalls. Not least of those being the speed you need to create at to engage with the moment, which was something I had intended to avoid. That being said, it was a moment that struck a nerve. At the time, my news feed was a particularly grotesque gallery of horrors. I remember scrolling through story after story about new climate change findings, the pushback against student debt forgiveness, the horrors in Gaza, and then there it was. A news listicle covering ten things someone didn’t like about the new Superman movie image that was released. The juxtaposition and absurdity of it all lingered in my brain for days and days. I understand the nature of media around movies, comics, and video games. The constant feed of article after article. I understand what comes with that. But even ignoring the coincidence that fed me these articles in this particle order, the absurd negativity of the listicle really affected me. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, sure, but the discourse around movies, comics, and video games has become increasingly negative and without purpose. It’s exhausting. Speaking as a fan, I’m excited for the new DCU and for everything Gunn and the people around him are going to bring to that world. Speaking as an artist, I know what goes into making these kinds of promotional images. The rounds of approval, the pace at which you have to work. It’s daunting. To have it dissected and examined with such negative intent is just draining.

So, after a couple of days, I decided to disrupt my plans and create a poster to respond to the moment. It’s not a subtle design, but it does feature a talking skull, and I think that’s pretty cool. While it wasn’t where I intended to start, it was a start nonetheless. I was now making and sharing my own art again. We made it to Mount Doom. Throw out your jewelry. Time to make The Hobbit.

That first piece started my Without Civilization In Between series, a reference to an Oscar Wilde quote about America. It’s a series that became focused on the news of the moment in this country, and while it’s a series that helped me build momentum, I doubt I’ll be continuing it. At least not in its current form. It was what I needed at the time, but as I’ve done other pieces, this series has started to feel too specific, too narrow. And I’ll be honest, I’m tired of seeing you-know-who’s face any time I open my Instagram account. At some point I’ll rethink this series and make it more broadly about America and its history. Or I won’t. That’s the benefit of being on this journey. I can pretty much go wherever I want now.

Addendum

I had originally intended this update to come out on November 5th, but given the importance of that day, and all of its implications, I decided to wait until the end of the week. Not knowing how things would play out, I thought it was best not to add to the noise and weight of the moment. Once the election was over, I revisited this update almost every day. I made adjustments and rewrote whole sections again and again. I think this is definitely one of the clunkier things I’ve written, but at a certain point, the adjustments became less about making this post better and more about keeping my mind occupied. Ultimately, this update is about poster design and what motivated me to get where I am now creatively. But, frankly, it’s also about everything else that is going on. Afterall, a part of why I decided to start making art again was to work through the everything else. To express my frustrations, my hopes, and generally confront the things that scratch at my brain every moment of the day. My fear of climate change, frustrations with capitalism, the beauty I reluctantly find in humanity, and the dark humor that permeates through almost everything around me. All of that is in the work I’m creating. It always will be.

For my own sake, and the sake of anyone who engages with my work, I promise it won’t be heavy all the time. It can’t be. The weight isn’t what gives it value, after all. The value is in what the work gives us, what it adds. To that end, my hope is that the work I’m creating can offer something productive, something that lifts or pushes you through a period of time that is sure to be difficult. And when the art isn’t enough, know that the artist is here to help however he can.

Throughout this update, I’ve referenced The Lord of the Rings. The whole journey metaphor. Super clever, I know. In any event, given what is happening you’re certain to see people share the “all who live to see such times,” quote. It’s a great quote of course, and its relevance to our current moment in time is absolutely undeniable. That said, I wanted to end this post with a different quote from The Lord of the Rings. It’s not quite as good, but for me at least, it captures both the fear and resolve that I carry now. I will continue to carry it until it’s no longer needed.

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings