Archive for the ‘School of Practical Philosophy & Meditation’ tag
Philosophy Works Winter 2025 Advertisements

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.
Philosophy Works Fall 2024 Advertisments

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.

Spring 2024 School of Practical Philosophy & Meditation Advertisement Campaign

Jaime Rathore, the creative director for the advertising campaigns for The School for Practical Philosophy & Meditation once again hired me to create the MTA subway posters for the School. This time we worked with fellow School member and digital consultant Adam Wasserman to help generate ideas for the posters. Adam presented several ideas, the one that was selected features the word “TRANSCEND” trailed by a phrase that reflects common nagging realities (at least common to New Yorkers). A few of these phrases were:
- your late-night doomscrolling
- your roommate’s dirty dishes
- slow walkers
- your eight side hustles
The three that resounded best were: “TRANSCEND your late night doomscrolling,” “TRANSCEND your side hustles” and “TRANSCEND your roommate’s dirty dishes.” As both the budget and time were tight, I was asked to reuse some of the recent artwork. I did, however, create a new illustration for the doomscrolling concept (pictured above) as I didn’t have an appropriate asset. Below are the two in-car subway posters that will be presented above riders’ heads and one platform poster. Adam suggested editing the illustrated characters’ t-shirts from showing the entire School logo and name to only showing the logo (which I think works nicely).



Philosophy Works 2023-24 Ad Campaign

“The School of Practical Philosophy & Meditation offers a journey of self-discovery that guides students toward understanding their innate wisdom and appreciation of the underlying unity connecting us all. Philosophy Works, the introductory ten-week course, prepares students for mantra-based meditation, an offering upon completion.”
THE CHALLENGE
In-person enrollment has been dropping for the last two years. The brand identity has gone through many iterations. We need a campaign that will once again establish the School as the NY community hub for Practical Philosophy.
THE GOAL
To reach our audience more efficiently, speak to their pain point and engage them with the benefits of PHILOSOPHY WORKS. We expect to increase our in-person Philosophy Works classes on the Upper East Side and Tribeca.
MY DESIGN APPROACH
When on the subway, I seek out the illustrations commissioned by the MTA and I tend to lose myself in the stories that the illustrators create. I do not seek out advertisements. (Of course, I don’t need to as they can’t be missed.) Generally, the advertisements are not engaging. My approach to this project is to be a visual artist and storyteller, not an advertiser. My goal is to create an in-car advertisement that people may lose themselves in through illustrated New Yorkers and the possible interactions and activities of these characters. The School’s Creative Director, Jaime Sears felt that the advertisement needed to speak to the difficulties and uncertainties (“pain point”) commonly experienced by New Yorkers at this time. Ideally, the scenarios in the illustration will be familiar to most New Yorkers.
With these concepts in mind, I rode the subway and traversed the city. I photographed fellow commuters and eavesdropped on their conversations, observed their interactions. Specific individuals and life moments are represented in the final illustration. The majority of the characters in the final composition are real New Yorkers – commuters, pedestrians, recyclers, and even our infamous subway rats…

THE CAMPAIGN
As meditation is a key element of the School and a practice known to calm people, I elected to have meditation be the central element to the design. Without the funds for a photo shoot, I searched online for people meditating. I found an attractive young woman sitting on the floor with her hands’ index finger and thumb touching. At the School, people generally meditate in a chair, however, design-wise, I felt that the chair would take up too much horizontal space, so I purchased the rights to the photo of the woman on the floor in a criss-cross applesauce pose and changed the hand pose. I based the central illustration on this photograph. I also wanted to make the name of the School central, so I placed the School’s name on her t-shirt at the very center of the design.
I surrounded the meditating woman with vignettes of everyday life from subway to street. Moving from left to right: subway musicians, a Hasidic commuter studying, a young woman with her earbuds in place, a businesswoman busily texting, two men in conflict, an MTA maintenance worker sweeping as he watches a business dandy toss his coffee cup on the platform floor with a trash can nearby… At the center, a woman meditating with a fiery aura outlining her figure. Then to the street (right side of the design) – a young female pedestrain wearing a surgical mask, PRIDE revelers enjoying life, an older man observing the street scene from his window, a mother and daughter gardening, a food delivery guy on his bike, and people recycling. A few of these illustrations, I had already created for past projects. The subway musicians and female subway rider I rotoscoped long ago for a series of animations reflecting New York City life. The rat and delivery guy are from a 2D video game and installation, una geografia de ser. Recycling past illustrations was necessary as the turn around on this project was very tight. However, the rest of the work is new.
I created a version of the graphic illustration with thought bubbles or spoken text for the various characters, but the School preferred that viewers interpret the illustration for themselves. Throughout the illustrations, I attempted to represent points of conflict that are common to the density of New York City.

The platform poster is much simpler and hopefully striking. It merely presents a woman meditating. Since people are on the platform for a shorter span of time, waiting to get on a train or exiting the station, I wanted to create a graphic that would immediately speak to the commuter.
Here are images posted in the subway cars and in the platforms:



