After the somewhat successful launch of Imperium, my first generative art collection on fx(hash), I felt pretty exhausting by all the effort and energy it took. I decided to take some rest, and very quickly I had an idea for what my next generative art collection, codename Propaganda. I had always been captivated by the designs of propaganda posters—in particular WWII and Cold War era—and I wanted to do something around it.
The full idea behind the collection goes much deeper, and I’m not going to reveal it until closer to the launch, so you’ll have to be patient. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing about my creative process and my progress so far.
So it’s great to think I’m going to create something around propaganda posters, but how does one even create posters which would necessarily involve text along with characters, while embedding an aspect of generative art into it?
It all started when I saw this 1965 painting by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, titled Sunrise, which you can see below. What’s also interesting about this piece from Lichtenstein is that he did not invent Ben-Day dots, and neither did he come up with this sunrise motif: this was motif had already been used in comic books years before. Lichtenstein’s contribution was to recognize that the motif had an emotional power, and to capture it in a painting to make a statement about it to the viewers.
Colour offset lithograph
Generative Landscapes
What I find great about Sunrise by Lichtenstein is that it’s made of simple shapes and mostly plain colors, which is great to be extrapolated into an algorithm. This was going to be my starting point. I started with the idea of using pop art and ben day dots landscapes as background for Propaganda.
I also starting thinking of other landscapes beyond a sun rise, and felt that a chain of mountains would do very well, so I also created that with code too, fully generative. I’m sharing some examples below.
But landscapes were not going to be enough obviously, I had to come with the rest of the composition for posters. This is what I was going to focus on next.
First trials at full poster compositions
Below are the first two trials that I manually created to see how the outputs of a propaganda-poster collection might look like.
What’s interesting about the two pieces below is that you see pretty much all you need which compose a propaganda poster: a foreground character who is creating an emotional connection with the audience, a background pattern that sets the scene, and a slogan which serves as a call to action.
I also quickly landed on the idea of building the foreground layers with pre-rendered assets in SVG format so the visual quality of outputs would remain constant even after resizing.
My initial idea was to keep the slogans dark and satirical about various aspects of modern life and society: productivity, social media, consumerism, the mainstream media, the greed in modern warfare, and so on.
After showing that to a few people, I realized that the sarcasm in the slogans did not come through, as some people took it at face value. I couldn’t take the risk of seeing the collection being misinterpreted or sounding patronizing or naive, so I knew I would have to find another angle for the slogans, which I will talk about in a future article.
Also, something flagrant in those initial trials is that the backgrounds and foregrounds were stylistically disconnected, and I would have to fix that in order to make the collection consistent.
This would also require that I find the correct fonts for the slogans, in a way that the fonts would also be consistent with the rest of the design, and as much as possible allow for the slogans to be integrated into the design itself as any other pattern or element in the poster.
More Landscapes
I started expanding the landscapes as well, and drew inspiration from a beautiful ukiyo-e by Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige, which you can see below.
Balancing out the colors for that one is going to be tricky across multiple color palettes, not I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep it in the collection, but it was really fun to develop.
In addition, I ended up creating my own approach to creating a linear gradient to get a better render, because I wasn’t happy with the standard JavaScript gradient function.
Wanna Hear More?
I’ll leave it here for now. I have more to share, which I’ll keep for a future article. I aim at posting something every month or so.
If you want to be notified when the Propaganda collection will be released, the best is to follow me on Medium or Twitter, links below. Thanks!
