Art happens when someone wants to do it. Advertising and propaganda start from given ends and work backward to means. — Peter Schjeldahl, “What are artists for,” The New Yorker, Dec 21, 2020
Upon seeing Don Mee Choi’s in situ photos, I thought about doing similarly to advertise her October 2024 Department of English lecture, with a photo of her at Princeton. She proposed a location: the sculpture Song of the Vowels, a brief walk from our offices and the room where she taught last fall.
The trees along the plaza had grown their own way, as-shot not entirely a backdrop for typography:
In the positioning that I judged best suited the text, with Choi looking through the title of the lecture that had brought us to the statue we’d come to see, the “a” in “translation” neatly covered a spot of sky, but “Tr” wouldn’t read clearly (I tried other locations), and “The” and “of” would stand out better with darkness similar but not identical to that behind “Poetics” and “nslation” as shot.
I dismissed AI out of hand as an option for making a fuller background of leaves. I’d seen another designer’s AI, in thickening foliage, seem to change trees’ latitude. I knew how to do what the tree needed to be a backdrop. I knew this place.
As I selected patches of leaves and darkness, copied and pasted them and softened their edges so as to leave no trace of insertion or replication, painted a little, too, I thought of the artists in Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Painting Time, their devotion to craft over concept, to achieving verisimilitude. Here, the holes left in the foliage are as essential as the filling.
Is it art? With text laid over, the scene advertises a then-upcoming lecture, yes (the QR pointing to its webpage remains live). It also catches the intentional, composed moment of a realization in progress of a desire occasioned by its given ends.
Another recent favorite poster was, unbeknownst to me while designing it, one of the last I would design before having Princeton’s 2024 visual branding guidelines to work within and streamline my process.
What visually conveys a concept? Here, beyond the speaker’s photo, academic titles and lecture title and the necessary details of where and when, I was left to my own devices (not unwelcome). I took as elements to select from photos from a batch I’d shot a few years before with no idea how I might use them, only of their subject, temporal, inadvertent at first, and marvelous: a faceting of sunlight through water in a crystal goblet onto an afternoon wall.
For fun, and to test how the new visual branding guidelines worked with a layout not designed around them, a year after the fact I returned to the Illustrator file:
The logo “lockup” with the Princeton shield effectively frames foreground content, and allows for the removal of “at Princeton” from English’s logo for on-campus uses that works so well in Don Mee Choi’s poster, and here, too, I think.
QR code omitted. Shine on, facets.