Structural Patterns

Once again working with The School for Practical Philosophy & Meditation’s Director of Marketing Jaime Sears and Marketing Consultant Adam Wasserman, I launched our initial meeting by sharing two of my favorite MTA commissioned illustrators – Jillian Tamaki and Sophie Blackall. I recounted how upon seeing these illustrations in the subway cars, I would get lost considering all the characters these artists created and the New York archetypes represented. Both Adam and Jaime were taken by Sophie Blackall’s illustrations in particular – one of a crowded scene within a subway car. Adam thought it would be fun to have our own past campaigns mounted as the advertisements within the car. Either at this initial meeting or the following meeting, Adam shared an image of a person in a meditation pose that appeared to be created from layered construction paper. In doing so, he proposed a shift in aesthetic to try something new. Adam used Adobe’s generative AI tool, Firefly to create the image. It was an exciting departure from the vector-based illustrations that I had been creating for The School and Jaime liked the aesthetic, so I agreed to give it a try.

After spending a bit of time with Adobe Firefly, I realized that getting a successful image would be a great deal of work. The tool generates a lot of odd glitches when it comes to details and of course even with highly detailed text descriptions, it cannot generate what one has in mind. Fortunately, my years of painting as well as digital composting, helped me formulate a plan – I would breakdown the image from background to foreground, treating each element individually and I would need to provide precise reference images. I would also need to correct obvious glitches.

One morning, I got up early to photograph an empty subway train as well as individual passengers to use as reference images. I composited multiple images of one side of a subway interior, to delete the center pole and expand the width of a single bench. The empty car composite as a reference successfully generated the setting for the poster. The image below was the team’s favorite.

I removed the backgrounds of individual riders to simplify the reference images. However, even with this step, I needed to carefully mask the Firefly characters from their backgrounds to set them on the subway car bench and of course digitally corrected many oddities.

I considered the elements that make riding the New York City subway unique in comparison to other cities such as musicians and dancers. Online I found a mariachi bassist, as well as a pole dancer to use as reference images. All three of us, Jaime, Adam and myself, felt that these two characters were what made the image engaging. Unfortunately, upon review, the MTA flagged the two characters and they had to be deleted.

I recycled past illustrations to generate a few of the characters such as the two women toward the left of the poster, the central meditator and the man reading a book at the far right. The dog in a hand bag was the result of searching for countless reference images and coming across an article about the COVID uptick of dogs on the subway. The aura behind the meditator required masking, gradients and fiddling with opacity to get it right.

Lastly, I worked on the subway car windows and the elements outside the car. Between Illustrator and Photoshop, I created a gleam as a window effect. I found a photograph of a flying pigeon as a reference and used NYC skyline images to help generate the buildings in the distance. To the right, I added a blue gradient for the copy and fussed with text to have it fit nicely.

The Marketing Team came up with the catch phrase “ELEVATE YOUR EVERYDAY.” We tried a few fonts before landing on the sharp and clean Futura bold with a drop shadow to finalize the poster.

The platform poster was a good deal quicker as it consisted of one character, reuse of the aura and relatively minor digital editing of the background. However, I consider it a boring poster that does not reflect the nuances of New York City.

As much as I enjoy the final in-car image, my takeaway regarding Adobe Firefly is that it’s useful for quick brainstorming and quick graphics for social media and email announcements. However, for a high-quality print image, Firefly generated images require a great deal of planning and painstaking digital retouching. Also, I did not mention the many many images generated before getting the ones that I could work with.

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I just discovered that Alisa Harris included Brooke and I in a comic series that she created during the 2013 Just Food Conference as part of her Cooking Up Comics graphic blog. As I don’t recall ever being rendered as a comic, I needed to archive Alisa’s piece!