Before I started sketching ideas for the poster I made for iam8bit’s So You Created a Wormhole art show, I did some research and jotted down some jumping off points. Early ideas included a time travel safety poster, a wanted poster (hey, even I get boarded sometimes) with various time jumping outlaws, a “My First Time Travel Kit” advertisement and a technical illustration for creating your own time travel device.



After looking at the options, I decided to have a go at the time travel kit, minus the ad aspect. The technical illustration was too much work (I had a week to make the poster before handing it off to the printer), the wanted poster relied too heavily on existing franchises and I just couldn’t figure out a way to make the safety poster interesting.



After doing some research into early “My first…” kits, I saw that many have a printed board in the upper portion of the case. I decided this ample space negated the necessity of making the poster an ad for the time travel kit. Anyway, the idea of it being an ad felt like an unnecessary layer between the viewer and the kit. It’s already a fictional time kit from the future - does it really need to be a fictional ad for a fictional time kit from the future? Nope. Another win for Occam’s razor.



So from here, I jumped into the fun part of the process: Bringing it all to life. If I’ve learned anything from maintaining Raygun52, it’s that I really love worldbuilding. In Raygun52, I’ve built a dystopian future via Bishop’s weekly commentary (Side note: I only speak for Bishop when he can’t send a time transmission before the post date.). In this poster, I relied on the blinding optimism of the headline text juxtaposed against the disturbingly ominous fine text. I also decided that to strengthen the reference to early science kits, I’d borrow from the scientific optimism of the 50s, which gave the poster a fun retro-future vibe. You can see some more shots of the printed poster in my portfolio.

Overall, I’m really pleased with how the poster turned out. Carrying the worldbuilding over from Raygun52 is a great example of work being directly influenced by other unrelated projects. Creating a poster is one thing - creating a poster that hints at a grander story was a fun and unique twist to my past poster processes.