ONE OF MY MOST FUN PROJECTS started off as a poster for a lecture about the rise of drug culture in Germany in the decades after the end of WWII. A colleague asked if I could do it on extremely short notice, and with such a solid-gold title I couldn't say no. I decided to go as low-tech as possible in order to work quickly.
I tipped over a nearby bookshelf and scrawled the title on the back panel in grease pencil. Then I formed a quick flag out of ground-up pieces of sidewalk chalk. Finally, I added a rusty razor blade and faked out an old deutsche mark I found on the Internet. I snapped a quick a digital photo and off to the printer—no Photoshop. The whole thing took an hour.
The poster was a success—they all got swiped (college—it figures) almost as soon as they went up, and the speaker liked the concept and wanted to use it for his book cover. I was happy to do it, but the publisher insisted on a white background and gave the spine and the back cover to their in-house designer. I'm pleased with the outcome, but I like the trashy, back-room immediacy of the original poster a bit better.
