You Only Have One Life

Ever since I designed my poster on the Seasonality of Californian Fruits and Vegetables I have been focused on doing graphic design that means something more than the sum of its visual elements - I want to design things that mean something. And I don't mean simply infographics. This is why I have been drawn to the "The Say Something Poster Project" competition. Here is my entry for their second season, "This Way Forward."

Thought Process

The prompt for "This Way Forward" said to "say something" to the next generation, given the past 2 - 5 years, to help inspire, motivate, and prepare them.

This is my "inspiration statement:"

Despite distracting much of this generation, gaming is about heroism. My poster uses gaming iconography to depict each person as a game hero who must save the prince/princess. But, crucially, we are not our game avatars: we only have one life to live.

My idea is that particularly in the past few years, our generation, today's 16 - 25 year olds, has become increasingly distracted by digital media. This is a problem: how do we remain productive when digital entertainment is so huge and pervasive?

While facebook and twitter and tumblr are more iconic of this trend, video games are a huge part of it - gaming is the grandaddy of all digital distractions! Games turned out to be a fruitful way to explore this problem and eke out some kind of message. You can say a lot of true (and truly boring) things about Facebook and Twitter: they cater to narcissists, they're all about networking, etc.. Sure there is a message in there, but I feel like people talk less about games (though that's changing) so observations about them just seemed more powerful:

• games are about heroes
• game avatars are insanely motivated
• in a game, you are motivated through, and at the risk of, death
• game avatars are in some way ideal selves

That last one, that game avatars are ideal selves - creatures or things or people that are more capable of doing the sorts of things that we normal people want to be able to do - made me think of this final bullet point:

• real people, unlike game avatars, only have one life to lose.

A game wouldn't be fun if you could only die once and never play the game again after that. But, that's what our lives are. But there is something more to draw out of that. Game heroes do great things - that's part of what makes some games interesting. Doing great things is hard, so you naturally get more chances to do it.

And when you're on that last life, man, things get intense. You really want to keep going, you really do not want to fail.

This is true of video games, but isn't it true of real life?

We only have one life, why aren't we trying harder to do what it is that we want to do?

There's probably a complicated answer to that question, but that's not what this is about. That paradox struck me. If we saw life as a video game, if we saw our lives as video game lives, would we try harder? Would that realization that we only have one chance to jump on the bad guys, save the princess, and reach the flagpole, make people more motivated?

I think that if it doesn't in the long term, it is at the very least a reality check, in a quite literal sense.

So, that was the thought process behind my idea, and at that point I honed in on Mario as an icon of video  games that is universally recognized and from there I took on the task of creating a bunch of 8-bit "anybodies" to take the place of Mario in the design.

Design

I have grown a lot in the last few months as an Illustrator user, so I decided to do a quick mock-up of my idea in Illustrator. Normally I begin on paper, but this project didn't have so much in terms of illustrating and drawing to do. All the lines had to be right.

This is the initial mock-up. I hadn't built any of the assets yet so Mario is just repeated in the background. I liked this design broadly speaking, but the contrast between the text and the background is a little jarring.  In the stroked text I was going for something reminiscent of Nintendo's logo.

Though this was a reasonable first move, I feel like this is symptomatic of a design habit I have that I think carries over from typography: I always try to remain true to the theme of a central design element.

I am doing a logo right now, for example, that uses isometric shapes. In that design, I poured over many drafts that tried to make everything else in the design isometric in some way. Even though I was keeping with the theme, it just didn't look good.

Anyway, my next task was to design a bunch of people heads. I ended up making 42 unique heads with the 8-bit mario as my template. It was pretty challenging. I can't even think of 42 people off the top of my head. One thing that helped me get through all the heads was to design heads based on people I know and characters I love.

Some heads. Walter White and Badger are the bottom two.

8-bit David Bowie circa Aladdin Sane.

The final roster.

OK, so I got my heads together. The next issue was the typography. I cut down my message to "You only have one life" but I still had that ugly Nintendo font.

The problem that presented itself here was that there isn't really any good font to use with 8-bit design - unless the font itself is 8-bit. To solve this problem, I turned to the history of posters. I turned to the most famous of all posters, or at least it seems that way nowadays, the Keep Calm and Carry On poster from WWII Britain.

There are plenty of parodies of this poster and it's really quite recognizable, but I felt that the context of my poster is so different that my allusion to it in using Gill Sans and all caps was not all that passé.

So, I used Gill Sans, but of course it still doesn't look perfect within the confines of an 8-bit aesthetic. I redrew the text in an 8-bit style and used that as a drop shadow to create a transition between the text and the background.

That's the final text, but I got stuck on this version below for quite some time:

This image has two "drop shadows" - one in green and one in blue. I thought this would work because I was thinking of television monitors and RGB, but again, I got fixated on sticking to a design theme so much so that I didn't realize that it looked a little too messy. I still kind of like it, but oh well!

The final touch was to string some text around the border. I was worried that "You only have one life" was just a statement of fact that didn't help motivate or push people in the right direction. So I went back to my original text, "jump on bad guys" and extended that with some other text around the frame:

Visually I'm not 100% sold on the text but it's important, I think, to the message. Plus, this gives the poster impact at many different distances. You can read the central text from afar. The characters are visible from a medial distance, and this smaller text appears when you are closer.

I could fidget with this design for another week, but I think that the law of diminishing returns applies here and I'm happy to have it in my portfolio.