This piece was a submission for a college project while I attended SSU. The project was to create a promotional banner for a conference titled, you guessed it, IMAGINE. Originally, the assignment boundaries were to include the title Imagination, the small amount of subtext displayed on this image, as well as a couple more paragraphs of text. However, after consulting with the professor, I was allowed lenience to strike the additional text. My argument was simply; “Why include paragraphs of text in a promotional poster? Couldn’t that be saved for a brochure or some type of handout instead of cluttering the poster with unnecessary text that probably wouldn’t be read by viewers anyway?”

The idea of IMAGINE was to influence our posters in a strong way. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that we, as humans, are most imaginative while we are asleep. I knew that would be my imagery early on; but more so than that, I tried to recall when my dreams were most vivid or most creative. While browsing stock art, I realized that the times when I have my most intense dreams are when I am stressed or upset. However, when you are stressed and upset, you are rarely asleep. So, in order to bridge the two ideas, I determined this image to be most effective. The material (or conscious) world shows a highly stressed man, but he has been so overwhelmed he has passed out. The image alone wasn’t enough though to show any kind of imaginative properties, so I duplicated the image and layered them both with different opacities in an effort to create a dream like quality. After achieving this effect, I hyped up the background to emulate even more confusion and abstraction to this dream state of the subject. Finally I embellished the title Imagine as well as the subtext. However, during my final consultation with my professor, we both decided to revert the subtext to a more mainlined, simple font face to allow the viewer an escape from the chaos of the rest of the poster.