The Anxiety of Exclusion

This poster was inspired by the film “Still Alice” - a story about early onset Alzheimer’s disease and its effects on all who are touched by it. The title has to do with that period of time when, knowing one’s prognosis, an individual struggles to accept the inevitable separation from everything familiar in life. Death is not as worrisome as the knowledge that one will soon cease being oneself but will still be alive. I have no doubt that my own age informed the decision to design a poster about this topic.

The Candidate's Mood

This concept emerged fully developed in the short time it took to drink a cup of coffee with my politically savvy pal Hailey Klein. She was an active campaigner for Barak Obama, Deval Patrick, and others. On this day, when asked how things were going, she answered that quite simply it depended on the candidate’s mood: up or down; high or low - in all cases, subject to any number of unpredictable circumstances in the politician’s life. It sounded awful, but also sounded like a play that needs to be written.

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The background map and vintage photo reference Biddeford Pool, ME. The play’s conceit is based on a monument near my family’s property. The stone commemorates the first European settlement in southern Maine. Dr. Richard Vines and his company wintered there among the Indians, years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, to prove that the climate in the northern part of America was hospitable enough to sustain Englishmen.

False Documents

This poster was my first attempt to create an image for a play not yet written. It was also one of the first examples of the influence Saul Steinberg had on my design sensibility. I still love his idiosyncratic parody of the visual cues we typically associate with graphical items regarded as valuable, official or authentic: notary seals, finely illustrated currency, illegible signatures underlined by equally illegible fine print, small handwritten notes in the margins, and such. His work is even better in-person.