Off the clock
Client work pays the bills, and it’s mostly tidy. Phone screens, sensible flows, problems with a right answer. I wanted something expressive with no brief behind it, so I followed an itch. Moody, chunky, colourful posters had been filling my Pinterest for weeks, the kind where gothic type sits straight over a photo and the subject pushes through the letters.
Ideation, not implementation
The references all share one move. The title is huge and the subject passes in front of it, so the word and the image fight for the same space. The brutalist ones add their own grammar on top: desaturate the photo to near-duotone, allow exactly one acid colour, blunt grotesque or gothic type, barcodes, tally bars, a column of credits no one reads. Yellow for the ruined tower, red for the bandages, orange for the monument.
Midjourney handed me the subjects and nothing else. You can generate something that looks good. You cannot, at least not yet, generate a well laid-out graphic. For the layout I drove Figma through its MCP with Claude Fable, the best available as I write this, and nothing could position a poster properly. It managed the odd accent, then fell apart the moment it had to place a mask or another visual with any care. The state of the art wasn’t enough. Good for ideation, terrible for implementation. I think that speaks volumes. So the layout, the restraint, and the masking where the subject cuts through the type all stayed with me.
I like making things
I don’t want to be the person who only does simple phone UI. I like making things. All the things. This was one of them, put together between jobs with no one to please, and it turns out that’s sometimes exactly what you need.
I refined the four that called to me and left the rest. Most of the batch I just wasn’t feeling, and that’s allowed when nobody’s waiting on it.