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, choosing trees of a different climate zone.
As I selected, copied and pasted patches of leaves and darkness, and softened their edges so as to leave no trace of insertion or replication, painted a little, too, I thought of the trompe l’oeil artists in Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Painting Time, their devotion to craft over concept, to achieving verisimilitude. Here, for verisimilitude, the holes retained intact are as essential as the filling of others is for legibility of the end that we worked backward from.
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 an intentional moment, 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 headshot, academic titles and lecture title and the necessary details of where and when, I was left to my own devices, a welcome situation, for I had elements to select from among: a batch of photos I’d shot a few years before with no plan then how I might use them, and certain that the effect I’d happened to turn and see was marvelous: the faceting of sunlight onto an afternoon wall through water in a crystal goblet I was holding. Moving goblet and camera, I’d cast and snapped photos of patterns of light that existed only as they were projected.
The irregular curved lines of the text framing are traced from facet edges:
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.