Digital Design Challenge 2023

Somewhere in a near dark future, a man walks the desolate alleyways as rain pours overhead. He is presented this advertisement on a glowing neon sign. A beautiful chrome robot, the man weighs his options, indulge in his vices or return to his lonely home for the night? He chooses to spoil himself with some metallic company… 

My submission for the 2023 digital design challenge fits into the ‘Visualisation Media’ category, as it is a mock advertisement. The advertisement’s style takes heavy inspiration from Cyberpunk 2020, the original version of the Cyberpunk table top roleplaying game released in 1988. The advertisement shows off a robot woman, who invites the viewer in with a seductive pose. This advertisement would likely be used by a strip club or robot ‘companion’ dealership in the future. 

My creative process was chaotic. I initially had a partner, and we were planning on splitting the work, allowing us to create something a bit more adventurous and in depth. However, they tapped out early on, leaving me to come up with something by myself. The initial idea was a 10-15 page comic, with a focus on advertising and layout. However, I opted to simply make one poster, and put all my energy into making that one poster look good. I spent around 12 hours alone working on the drawing, as it was in a style I was not too familiar with. I attempted to colour in a similar way to the original Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebooks, which have a very classic 80s colouring style. In terms of layout, that took up the brunt of my time afterwards, as I experimented with different compositions and effects to really capture the message I wanted to send. I used two fonts in my submission; Eurostile as the subheading, a font used in the original Cyberpunk and many other classic sci fi, and Inverserif for the heading. 

How does this submission fit the theme? With a very tongue in cheek reference directly on the poster. ‘Life out of control?’ Yes, it’s very smart. Otherwise one could say a capitalistic cyberpunk hellscape would make things pretty out of control, and this poster would fit right in. In all honesty the theme was not too heavy on my mind during creation, I mainly used this challenge as an opportunity to push myself to create something I would not otherwise make within 24 hours, or at all. 

References: 

AlexiAction. (n.d.). Lifelike. Retrieved from the Pixabay website: https://pixabay.com/music/search/cyberpunk/ 

Fonts in Use. (n.d.). Eurostile in use. Retrieved from the Fonts in Use website: https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/3424/eurostile 

Fonts in Use. (n.d.). Iverserif in use. Retrieved from the Fonts in Use website: https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/42882/inverserif