Drink Up Before Your Times Up

After our unit on the Fluxus design movement, our class was assigned an in-class project to apply the concepts we learned in practice. One of the key principles of the Fluxus movement is the use of playfulness when it comes to the design process. The assignment was to pick a task that was often seen as mundane such as tying your shoe or brushing your teeth and create a poster through the Fluxes lens and inject a sense of playfulness in the design.

For this project I decided to choose the mundane task of drinking water and turn that into a PSA sort of poster. I started off with an image of a simple glass of water and brough that into photoshop where I did some minor adjustments to the image. After that I used photoshop's Generative AI to create skeleton hands that were reaching out to the glass of water almost as if they were desperate for a drink.

Once I had my background image completed I moved on to the phrase that I wanted to use. I started with something along the lines of "the clock starts ticking after your last sip" which is in reference to the fact that your body can only survive a short amount of time without water and every time you are done drinkning the countdown begins. This phrase seemed a little too long to me so after toying around with some other phrases I landed on:

Drink Up Before Your Times Up

This gave that sense of urgency that it is important to drink water regularly and the juxtaposition of using the word "up" twice made the message short and sweet. I mixed my typefaces by using a generally modern typeface mixed with a script typeface to try and break awa from the overall cleanliness and grid feel that the poster had.

The goal of this project was to have fun and create posters that mimicked the style of Fluxus era posters. Sometimes it is hard for me to let go of my perfectionism and embrace the spontaneity and playfullness of the fluxus process. However, I am very pleased with how this project turned out and I look forward to incorporating more Fluxes principles into my design work.