If Warren Ellis keeps making his remodel threads involve movie posters, I’m afraid you’ll probably end up seeing a lot more of these.

This one could probably double for a Spider-Mad-Men mashup. If for some reason you wanted such a thing. I would have added angular ties, if that was the direction I was going for. But this one remains strictly Lynch. You can tell because of the weird shoes the one woman silhouette is wearing.

You can wear the print-ready PDF, which is available here.

This was done for Warren Ellis’ Remodel thread. I always like those, but I don’t draw very well. I do, however, make posters. This will probably be the only Steampunk thing ever to be found on POSZU. And, frankly, it’s not even a very good poster. But I wanted to play along, and so here it is.

I do like the mask though. In my vision, the Steampunk Batman franchise would use the mask as it’s Bat-logo.

PDF, for those who can’t seem to find free Steampunk ephemera ANYWHERE, is here.

Today on TMPD, we’re going to be reviewing the book cover for Tim Maly’s new book.

The art is eye-catching, if not original. Echoes the widely distributed paperback version of Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides, and a particular Joy Division album cover are fairly present. Still, regular readers of TMPD will know that I am a big fan of minimal, flat shapes, InDesign gradients, and simple, retro-looking fonts. Also, although I often force myself to use color, I can’t help enjoying the simplicity of grey scale. 40% and 70% white over black give a very classy, thin ghosting effect, reminiscent of the Twilight Zone, somehow.

Not sure how this design relates to the subject matter of the book. I do like the island silhouette motif–its a repeatable icon that could be used in branding or as chapter headers in the text. But are the different takes on the outline meant to stand for certain utopias discussed in Maly’s authoritative treatment of utopia’s afterlife? Or are they simply meant to be variations on a theme–signifying the epistemological category of utopia in general, or the critical approach Maly employs in bringing them all together in context? Those who have already read the book, or are seeking it out by name, will be aware of the prose on its own merits. So is it really necessary to overload the cover with line drawings of “network” imagery? Perhaps a simple dust jacket with the title and a bit of color would have been more appropriate. But, the goal of the cover is to sell the book–so clearly that is what the publisher intends with this approach.

Unlike such important books, no doubt destined to be canonical, art appeals or doesn’t appeal to many different aesthetic sensibilities. So, feel free to download the PDF and judge for yourself.

[Note: the PDF has some rendering issues that I haven't had time to figure out. So sorry for the weird dashed strokes that appear in certain places. If you are indeed downloading this for any reason.]

Well, I thought long and hard about whether or not I should post this one. But here we are.

For starters, Cyborg Month is officially over. But more pressing than that, was the issue of whether or not I really wanted to admit that I’m that much of a geek that I not only conceptualized a poster to commemorate Cyborg Month, but then spent more than several hours bringing it into existence. This is probably bordering on the fan art territory, to be quite honest. And that is a slippery fucking slope.

But then I was looking at these awesome Czechoslovakian Book Covers, and I was thinking how it is a shape that book covers, especially for academic titles, are so serious with their design, and don’t venture into art quite so much anymore. I was also thinking of the ubiquitous conference poster, that anyone who has spent time in academia will have seen slathering the walls and bulletin boards of their department hallways. What an excellent opportunity for art! Here are posters that are going to be printed, regardless of whether they have anything on them. Why not use that as a space for artists?

So here is my contribution of a poster for the 50 cyborgs not-really-a-conference-not-a-book-either. Advertising something that is already over, without really advertising it, and mostly just contributing to general Internet over-exuberance. The scheme was actually something I came up with for a customer, that I can tell they will not like, but I liked it, so I wanted to actually use it. Looks like a vintage set of Uno cards, kind of. The draw 4 card especially, which I can’t find an image of on the Internet (only the current version). Oh, and the circuit diagram is actually a working circuit for a voltage amplifier. Yikes. Went there.

So here we are. I’m a geek; cyborgs are awesome; and I spend a lot of time rotating and re-sizing vector art on the computer to amuse myself. If you are a cyborg geek as well, you are welcome to a full-sized PDF of the poster, available here. Everything on POSZU is Creative Commons Non-com, Attribute, Share-alike, by the way.

Well, I think it’s safe to say that doing these posters is some of the most satisfying work I’ve been up to lately. So satisfying, that I’m running out of Twitter-quips to turn into posters. If you’d like to compose something witty and succinct, hit me up @interdome, and maybe if you sound as self-satisfyingly sardonic as me, I’ll immortalize you in a poster.

Today’s poster is inspired by @djrupture, who hasn’t been tweeting as much lately, but if he starts doing his breakfast posts again, then I will most definitely have to do a breakfast poster. “Breakfast posters”: the future of digital print. Forget direct mail. Breakfast is where it’s at. You heard it here first.

If you eat print-ready PDFs for breakfast, you are welcome to help yourself to this selection from the CYMK omelet station, here.

And we’re back with another Motivational Poster, this one completely without the courtesy or permission of @dcurtisj. Not to say he wouldn’t be courteous if asked–I just didn’t ask.

Love this slogan. M and I laughed about it for a long, tasing fifteen minutes. She tried to roll it out at work, but they weren’t having it. Too bad. No one can escape the future, so you might as well learn to like it. Hopefully this poster will motivate you for that.

This one has a lot to like. A symbol, ready for branding a tased future, pastel colors, and enough repetitive circles to make you puke. Which is a good thing, because if you’re puking, you are more likely to survive being tased. Really. There is scientific evidence to back this up.

If you like this poster enough to not want to tase me, you are welcome to a print-ready PDF of it, here.

Another motivational poster, though not from Twitter, this time. M, my partner, just read The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, which she enjoyed. She also enjoyed my other posters, and so she asked me to design a poster around the text above, which she thought was a hilarious line from the book. That’s the line, as near verbatim as she can remember. I don’t normally do requests, but she gets that privilege. Though let’s be honest: if someone had a request, I’d probably do it (if I could think of something.)

InDesign practice-wise, the logos were the easy part. Doing the speech bubbles took forever, trying to shape all those tiny curves. Anyone know of a preference setting so that the Zoom hotkeys will zoom on the current view, not on the selected object? If you do, let me know over Twitter, or something. (@interdome.) Was getting car sick from scrolling around.

So now she has this lovely poster to grace her bedroom door. I struggled with this one for a bit, until I hit upon the icon theme. It ends up fitting nicely with the “motivational” qualities of the rest of the series. We’re thinking of surreptitiously hanging these up and grocery stores. You could think of it as a guerrilla art campaign to “Ban the Bag”, or we could just be jerks. Either one is really fine.

If you are as tickled by it as she is, even though you are not my partner in the eyes of the State and therefore required to act with at least brief bemusement as required by law, you can download the full PDF here.

Another motivation Twitter poster, words courtesy (and all of these are without permission, I might add) of @AmericanRoulete.

As you might be able to tell, I like minimal. For some reason, I was thinking airline advertisement. I wanted to make the faded curves fade on a gradient, but I ran out of time. Anyway, it’s kind of more jarring this way, and jarring is good, as long as it isn’t amateurish. But too late for that anyway.

At the very last minute, I decided to make it work on its side as well, which I might like better, but I can’t really tell.

Looks even more like an airline ad now.

You can print it out and try flipping it around for yourself, with the PDF, here. Feel free to try it with art facing the wall. That might even be best.

In the world of the Internet, twice is a series. The other day a twitter post inspired me to make a tabloid-sized faux inspirational poster as design practice, and so I’m making a series of it, any time I feel the urge. Like any series, this will last as long as it continues to entertain me, and as long as I find content that makes it work.

Thanks to @georgelazenby for this poster’s tweet.

This poster could be better, but I have so many paths on the pasteboard now it’s making everything slow and irritating, so like that, it’s done. I wish the center colored heptagons were 3D, like a prism, but it is what it is. I don’t want any of these to take more time than I can devote in one day.

And if for some bizarre reason you find this serves as a successful digestive aid, you can get the full-sized PDF here.

This Twitter post stuck in my head all day, and so I made it a little bit of InDesign practice. I’ve done a lot of text layout, but I’m trying to get better at gradients and color art.

The double-meaning kinda goes the other way in print rather than Twitter.

If for some reason you think this is funny as I did, you can get a full-sized PDF of the poster here.