1

Curate 3 posters from the People’s Graphic Design Archive. These should be posters you like and would want to hang in your room. Come to class ready to talk about why you think the posters you chose are cool, interesting, appealing, important, whatever. Tell us very succinctly, in one sentence, what the vibe of the poster is and why you find it compelling. (You have 5 minutes to present the posters.)

2

With the three posters you chose in your mind, describe in words a fourth poster that would belong to the set you’ve curated. This is a poster you’ve never seen before. This is a poster you would want to hang in your room. Imagine the poster, formulate its concept, borrowing and expanding from the 3 posters you curated. Describe this poster as succinctly and evocatively as possible, in one paragraph. Your vision of the poster, or at least its verbal formulation, might be incomplete, but some aspects should be clear. You can describe the content or the form or both, or something else, like how the poster makes you feel or some other effect it might have on a viewer. The poster in your mind should not be objectively complete in every sense. Focus your description on the concept of the poster and its vibe. The poster does not need to be about graphic design, but graphic design should be important to its overall effect or meaning. 

The “verbal picture” you produce will be used by your classmates as a script to execute, so keep that in mind — which is to say, write it to be read as an instruction that will require interpretation.

Print 3 copies of your text on a letter size sheet.

3

Exchange texts with your classmates. Everyone should have 3 different texts. 

4

Use your texts to produce 3 posters that follow the instructions. Think about the constraints that each text imposes. Think about what the text leaves open and where it calls for an interpretation. Start sketching your posters one at a time or alltogether. The additional constraint is that all three of your posters should have some single investigation in common: a set of forms, an attitude, a vibe. As you go and work out your interpretations and formalize your instruction texts as graphic design, develop your own “theme” that works itself through all three posters. You don’t have to come up with this unifying thing in advance, but try to develop it as you work, immanently.* Your theme could be at the level of form or content or the relation between them. At the end you should formulate this theme, or thing in common, in language.