Structural Patterns

As the School for Practical Philosophy & Meditation prepares for the fall registration, I again worked with creative director Jaime Sears and digital consultant Adam Wasserman to create the new advertisement campaign. We began by considering current events and New York City realities – the protests due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War, upcoming national elections, heightened political tensions, rising rents… And yet New Yorkers are incredibly resilient. Tourism appears to be thriving. Based on the heavy daily traffic, it appears that the city is hard at work. New building projects are everywhere and there isn’t enough housing. New immigrants are increasingly integrated into the city life… We sought to create an advertising campaign that captured the ongoing unrest while also celebrating the resilience of New Yorkers and adjacent to it all, the peace that one may achieve through philosophy and meditation.

I created a few new illustrated characters in meditation, two were selected. I scoured the web for New York City silouette landscapes and combined and reworked vector files to generate a city background. I also reworked silouettes of people protesting. I created two variations of this scene, one with characters that I had created and another only with silouettes. For the platform poster, I used a graphic AI to generate images of NYC residents protesting. It took many prompts to have an image generated that I wanted to work with. I vectorized the image, reworked it and then superimposed one of the meditating characters along with the text theme we landed upon: “PEACE BEGINS WITH YOU.” And the copy begins with the question “Struggling to find your place in a chaotic world?” The greater space of the platform poster permitted us to broaden the copy with a few of the outcomes from the introductory course “Philosophy Works”: learn timeless wisdom, focus, happiness and inner-strength.