Maxim Visualization

Content

One person i’ve come to admire during my design career is Mr. Stefan Sagmeister. Ever since my professor introduced him to us his work has never failed to amaze me. His book ‘Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far’ was one of his works that caught my attention in particular. The projects featured in this book were grand and creative, which even made me purchase a copy of his book on ebay.

My professor decided to take inspiration from this and had us create physical visualizations of a maxim, the definition of which is “a short, pithy statement expressing a general truth or rule of conduct”. With this in mind, I took a verse from an artist I really like. J. Cole’s song, Deja Vu, contains a verse that highly resonated with me, the verse being “every saint got a past, every sinner got a future”. It came to mind instantly during the assignment brief and with inspiration from Mr. Sagmeister’s work I was ready to jump headfirst into unknown waters, with excitement of course. It was fun writing on and playing with mirrors, especially when you find them at a thrift store. However, I can't say the same for vandalizing my own skin, especially my spinal area. It really hurt but it was worth it. Gutting a cute teddy bear I also got while thrifting made me feel bad but also worth it, unfortunately. Setting fire to slivers of paper outside my girlfriend’s was probably the most thrilling but I had to stay cautious and be precise. This has to be done a lot because the paper kept burning too fast but some gasoline and a new lighter in the end got me the result I wanted. My favorite however, was engraving/etching into a pair of headlights using my mini rotary tool. I taped a piece of paper to my laptop screen and traced the letters, then put that paper on the lights and used an xacto knife to trace/cut out the letters. This left an outline of the headlights which I then went in and engraved by staying inside the lines. Lastly, the only photoshopped image was a stop sign, for obvious reasons I could not actually tinker with it, but thankfully I have decent experience with photoshop and digital painting. Overall this assignment was really fun with how hands on and technical it was.