Suspend your Disbelief
A0 Poster Design
Self Portrait & Commentary
“Suspend your Disbelief” is an A0 poster that is both a self portrait as well as a commentary on corporate design. In this project, I wanted to invite the viewer to suspend their disbelief, and to let go of logic & to think bigger and think crazier with me.
This idea stemmed from my experience while working on several freelance projects over the past holiday. I felt a sense of confinement and frustration at the repetitive nature of corporate design. A feeling that I often likened to my boredom in math class way back primary school. At that time, my solution for my aversion to algebra was to doodling epic battles on the borders of my math books and leaving the actual questions blank. An idea that I decided to replicate in an attempt to escape my frustration but this time as a designer by recreating an epic battle from the borders of one of my old math books onto the poster.
“I never hear the word “escape”
without quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.
I never hear of prisons broad
by soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars —
Only to fail again! “
The girl in the illustration has bird elements like feathers & a beak in her helmet and hair symbolic of escape and the idea of flying away, while in a prayer pose, invoking the wish to escape. She has the tattoo of red chrysanthemums on her arm which are symbolic of rebirth or new growth.
The mythical creatures in her imagination are swarming out from behind her in a twisted cacophony encompassed by the steam that comes from the back of her helmet. The battle is ongoing and the sides are unclear but the characters are all connected together by their eye-lines and the positioning of their bodies so that the viewer can follow the battle in an S-curve back down towards the girl; the source of the battle.
“But I only tug childish at my bars — Only to fail again.”
This line in the poem is symbolic of how while such a poster is good catharsis from the professional clean and clear posters out there, I am aware of how such an ideal is not feasible in most cases. I, as a designer, will still have to be trapped in such projects as they are the bread and butter of what is needed from designers.
But still I cling not to the hope that one day. normalised design in Singapore can be exciting and fill of energy and life as the epic battles that filled the columns of my old math books.
“With quicker blood,
A sudden expectation.
A flying attitude.”
