Star Wars Posters Side Project
I have been waiting to write this little article for a long time, since I believe that side projects are very important to continue exploring new things and changing up your daily work routine.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…
I was at my desk working on a landing page when someone from the Design Team came up with the idea of adding posters in the meeting rooms of the BA office to make the workplace a little more playful. Obviously I said “Yes! Let’s do some research on the beautiful posters that already exist to buy time.” and I started looking for some of them. Since the meeting rooms have Star Wars planet names, I knew I wanted to match the names of each room with a poster of the planet. The thing was that: I could not find any designer who was able to put together the posters of the 9 planets with the same aesthetic.
So I had this conversation with my manager:
Me: Hey C, I can’t find any poster designer that gathers together all the planets we need
C: Mmmmmm
Me: What if we create the posters?!
C: We do not have that time to allocate to that task, it is a lot of work. Mmm, but it could work if it only takes you one week of work.
(so I doubled down)
Me: Give me 2 extra days, so I’ll be able to make 1 poster a day!
C: Are you sure? Ok do it!!
I hadn’t had the opportunity to design a poster since I left university, but I thought it was an excellent moment to improve my drawing skills by working on a company project and maybe make people happy too! Why not!!?
Prioritizing time for personal growth
This experience made me think: What if we sometimes use time from our daily work in the company finding opportunities to do side projects that help improve our skills? Side projects can be an amazing tool, they can help you to motivate yourself, improve your skills, grow as an employee and even in your personal life, in addition to making you feel better if you’re bored or creatively blocked.
Since then, I’ve made it a priority to continue dedicating some time throughout my work week to look for opportunities to create side projects or learning new skills, and this is an important action to take since most of the time your co-workers and manager can be too busy to look for these opportunities for you, so you have to take the reins by yourself.
As a result, I can look back and see my growth reflected in each piece of work I’ve made. It’s good to be at a company that supports efforts like this, and encourages all team members to set time aside for continuous personal development, so we can all continue growing together.
Oh yes!! And what about the posters?
Here are the final posters! Take a look, download them and print them if you want, all for free. Art is meant to be shared and enjoyed, so I hope you can make use of them as well. And of course, we will continue to share any new side projects that come to fruition.
Enjoy them!!
