Messy Mediums Ftw

Finding a way to mash up your design can pay big dividends

I wasn’t the most diligent student. Sometimes I tried to find myself an excuse to hide in the library, where it would be presumed I was doing work. In reality, I’d be hanging out with the other class-dodgers. Doodling.

On one such escape to the library I had to recreate some maps for a geography project. This turned into a very clear thought. “How do I make this take as long as possible?”

So instead of just printing some maps of the perfect area, I traced my maps from large sheet printed maps. This could only be done on the large reading tables in the library. Peace and quiet. Bliss.

Then it became clear that I needed to shrink the maps. Instead of starting again, and simply zooming out and printing the perfect area at the perfect size, I decided to use the photocopier scale function to amend my hand drawn versions.

More trial and error. More time. More peace and quiet. Apart from the whirrs and clicks and clunks from the paper feeding through the photocopier.

One satisfying consequence of all this tracing and copying and scaling and re-scaling was that my maps ended up with a delightful handmade, dirty, scruffy feel to them. They had character. They bore the marks of the maker. I remember being delighted with them.

A task that I could have knocked out in twenty minutes ended up taking three weeks. It also ended up being 100x more satisfying.

I regularly use a faster, more screen based version of this technique to inject some … offness into my work. Screen grab, paste, image trace, repeat.

These mangled versions of the work rarely make it into the final draft - but they often influence it.

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