Spreading ideas - and Wifi signals

This was the first project for my Exploratory Making class.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we were expected to prepare a gift on the first day of this class. Something we were interested in and felt uniquely connected to. I brought a version of my pocket wifi portal - a device I’ve blogged about in the past that creates for a localized, personalized wireless network of my choosing.

A poster with a 7 stanza poem

What she returned was a hand crafted collage of photos, of my chip, her friends checking out the webiste, and her surroundings when she showed it to them. I thought it was so cool how she took my digital gift and transformed it into something phyiscal - somthing that is more traditionally considered ‘art’.

Physical posters

Reflecting on my partners gift - I decided I wanted to build something physical. Originally I wanted to do something like oil paints, silkscreen etc - a very physical medium and something I had never touched before. However, time bounded forward and my days were pulled in multiple directions: work, other classes, sleep (sometimes). I found myself the weekend before this project was due with no progress made! Instead I turned to a medium slightly more familiar to me - graphic design!

Back in high school I used to use software to make memes, club flyers etc. But besides once for senior year science fair, I had never made a poster. And the design lab was just the place to start!

To begin, I rounded up the supplies I needed. Luckily I already had a supply of extra wifi chips on hand. And I also had a stack of 3 poster frames that I bought nearly a year ago, too small to fit the posters that I had bought them for.

I started by using Affiinity Illustrator (I hate Adobes predatory pricing model) to whip up designs for the three articles showcased on my pocket wifi website.

Illustration file showing the three posters I designed.

I started easy - The first poster was using a graphic that came with the article. I screenshotted it, cropped it and added some text and a sattelite dish to the car. This helped re-introduce me to the software, and get back in the grove of things. The second poster was a little more ambitious, adding in a stylized wifi logo and a license free photo of a chicken on a sea of Vox yellow. and the final one was similarly simple, a silhouette of a soldier standing in front of a Palestinian tricolor flame.

Even though these were all relatively simple posters, I tried to care a lot about positioning, fonts, and iconography. This was mainly due to my constraints in terms of drawing and experience with graphic design.

After designing, it was off to the printers! Because I started this project on the weekend and had never printed before, I assumed I would have access to the big Design Lab printers whenever I wanted. However, as Sunday night rolled around and I finally finished the designs - I found out from a fellow student that printers were appoitment only.

Panicked, I started searching around Brooklyn - looking for a print shop for my poster. All of them took at least 12 hours to print, which was time I didn’t have. However, I found that the ITP printer on the 4th floor printed 11x17 paper, which would do for my purposes. I printed the posters there, and cut them down to size.

Cutting the paper from 11x17 to 11x14

The prints weren’t as high quality as they would have been on the plotter, but they would do. After that I customized each wifi board to the respective poster, and taped the chips to the picture stand. What I was left with was three standardized posters that could all simultanously broadcast their networks to anyone in a few hundred feet radius

The three final prints

Reflections

Overall - I was very satisfied with how this project turned out! The prints were passable - but the nice frames sold the physical look. I think the simplicity of the designes added to their poignancy, especially at their small size. If I had more time, I would have liked to explore a more fine art approach. Something more physical would have stuck to my theme even better - although I fear my lack of artistic experience would have shown through even more than it did here.