It has been a year dedicated to completing an Everyday Challenge, creating A3 size posters using mostly gradients.
I decided to take on the challenge partly out of frustration with myself and partly inspired by the work of designers Song Hojong, from Korea and Vasjen Katro, from Albania. Instead of procrastinating, overthinking, or making excuses, I literally started an Instagram account and began my 365 poster series on January 1, 2023.
At first, many of the posters were mostly about researching techniques and emulating others. However, right around poster 100, things began to feel different. For one thing, I began to run out of accessible tutorials to follow along.
I began to feel worried. I began to feel like I was just churning crappy repeats or extensions of some tried techniques. Life also began to get in the way of having time to do research and test possibilities. Designing posters is not easy when you have to cook dinner for the family, take the car to get serviced, or you are downright sick in bed with a fever. I began to discover that real-life time constraints made it almost impossible to have a consistent schedule of sketching or publishing. I began to wonder how others do it with such a high level of complexity.
A couple of times I missed my count. Other times I had to publish twice in a day to catch-up to the actual accurate count. I messed-up the numbers a few times and simply rectified by publishing accurately the correct poster number for the date. I don’t know how this happened, but I even misspelled my last name a few times.
This exercise became eventually an act of sheer will, discipline and commitment—at some point it did not matter as much to be creative or fresh as to be accountable and consistent. I forced myself to do a lot of visual research and look at the work of others. I had to also dig through the internet for any type of tutorial that might be of interest or would showcase a technique I was not familiar with. As a result, I discovered great sources of inspiration and learned about alternate color palettes from other artists. The last set of posters I created were inspired by the work and techniques of Brazilian designer Marcos Silva.
I began amassing assets from previous posters and collecting assets from stock files. Remixing became an important process during this year-long experiment. Sometimes I would see someone else’s work and attempt to imitate a look or style; only to make a “happy accident” that would take me into a completely different direction. My 365 Project has plenty of accidents.
As I hit the summer, I began experimenting with making a lot of the posters using Procreate on my iPad, rather than Photoshop on a desktop. This process became a bit therapeutic, as I would come home from work and simply doodle for an hour using some new mechanics with the digital pencil and the software. After a few pieces though, this process also began to feel a bit limiting.
Not all of the posters are exciting or beautiful, there are plenty that strike me as just being reflective of a possible technique and style, and that’s all. They represent what is possible.
By the time I was more than halfway through, I began to realize a number of things and definitely understood some aesthetic choices I enjoyed over others. For one thing, I truly tend to be more of a minimalist—I can create distortion and complexity of layered details, but it is not my first choice and it almost always must have a purpose.
I definitely enjoyed creating a lot of the gradients that feel planetary or a view of space. I also enjoyed forms that look biological; interpretations of cells or organisms that look like macro illustrations of something that has an element of abstraction as you cannot tell the scale. I also enjoyed all of the pieces that have some degree of implied kinetic movement or displacement. I definitely avoided words or phrases, although towards the end of the project I crated a few pieces with words. The final piece is something I had somewhat envisioned halfway through the project. I designed the last poster in three different ways, but I am pretty happy with the one I published.
Everyday challenges are not for everyone. And while I don’t plan to continue to do daily sketches in 2024, I am not opposed to taking on the challenge again down the road. For now, it has been a great exercise and personal challenge to complete. I plan on working on other things in the year to come.
Chakris Kussalanant 