The brief for this project was to attract prospective MFA students from 'hipper' areas to what might be considered an unattractive area of Southern California: the Inland Empire. The theme we were given was "Weirdness in the Inland Empire".
I directed a team of talented designers through an exploratory process during which we worked inside the realm of the computer to visually communicate weirdness. We quickly arrived at the conclusion that we needed something not just weird but surreal, and in order to do that, we needed to stat with something real. That real element was the suitcase which, along with being iconic, would represent the concept of traveling.
Our response was to create the impossible by levitating suitcases in a concrete environment and then leaving that image there to float without explanation. The rectangle of text anchors the imagery visually and informationally.
Full-size Poster
Postcards (front and back)
Original image before compositing
