ASSIGNMENT
I have designed small Valentine posters for many years and previously they have been small "storyboardesque" illustrations. Last year I had the idea to break from that tradition, and while not a new concept to most graphic designers, I would try, to collect over the course of a year, photographs to illustrate a Valentine's greeting poster with found objects as letters–an approach totally new to me.
APPROACH
My approach was first laying down the rules: No altering of objects or images to "make a letter", all would have to be just as I found them out in the world, I would not be allowed to use the end of the poles on an outdoor swing set to represent the letter "A", nor tree limbs to make any letter. I thought this would be fairly straight forward, a kind of year long treasure hunt. It was surprisingly difficult, at least for me, to find objects recognizable as letters by most people that would also fit the physical format and my self-imposed rules. In fact as the deadline approached I found my "collection" from the whole year was sorely lacking in a number of letters. The letters generally appeared out of nowhere, as when I looked at a traffic light on the corner outside of the Seattle Art Museum on New Year's Eve and suddenly saw my much needed "E", or in October when my wife and I were on the platform of the "S" train in Brooklyn, for what seemed to be an interminably long wait and because of that wait, seeing an elderly woman using the ubiquitous steel handrail to go downstairs to an open bench, a magnificent letter "P" materialized out of thin air, or in April when discovering two old surfboards leaning inside a stranger's fence in Hawaii–making a never found again, letter "V". With the deadline closing in, as I was running out of time, I did break one of my own rules, and in late January I turned a lane narrowing sign upside down in Photoshop to make a not yet found "Y". I pass that sign everyday and hadn't seen it as a letter until I was under pressure of my self imposed deadline.
RESULTS
Two people I heard from said they really enjoyed my collection of photos but wondered what it had to do with Valentine's Day this year and another friend was pleased that part of his beautiful sailboat had made it into the Valentine poster starring as the letter "H". The letters became like stars, that is, when I would consciously be looking for them they seemed to hide, but when glancing out of the corner of my eye they would appear brighter than ever. At the last moment, I decided to put small captions on each photo, like photo credits, to state the location of each object letter, which turned out to be very popular with people receiving this poster and I felt gave the mostly mundane objects their own nine or ten seconds of fame.
