Today's centering exercise: Imagining Generic Posters. Posters with designs that serve any and all purposes in any given environment. Here's a few to get you started:
  • Neutral Photograph of Kitten standing next to rotary phone with receiver laying off its base.
  • Sharpened Pencil standing in middle of row of Unsharpened Pencils.
  • Star Constellation that looks vaguely like Albert Einstein
  • Spanish Muppets (group shot)
  • Entire text of Encyclopedia Britannica in 7pt font
  • Windsurfer sailing over a 19th Century Steam Engine Locomotive
  • The Backs of all US Presidents' Heads
Write down your best 32,000 designs and leave them in a neat list in the comment section.

Today’s centering exercise: Imagining Generic Posters.
Posters with designs that serve any and all purposes in any given environment.

Here’s a few to get you started:

  • Neutral Photograph of Kitten standing next to rotary phone with receiver laying off its base.
  • Sharpened Pencil standing in middle of row of Unsharpened Pencils.
  • Star Constellation that looks vaguely like Albert Einstein
  • Spanish Muppets (group shot)
  • Entire text of Encyclopedia Britannica in 7pt font
  • Windsurfer sailing over a 19th Century Steam Engine Locomotive
  • The Backs of all US Presidents’ Heads

Write down your best 32,000 designs and leave them in a neat list in the comment section.

Chris Weagel

Chris Weagel writes about the intersection of technology and parenting for Wired Magazine. No he doesn't. He can't stand that shit.

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  • – Room filled to the ceiling with large blue Swiss exercise balls
    – Used tire heap covering a 5 acre parcel on an abandoned farm
    – Glossy of healthy beafsteak tomato plants
    – Granite quarry hole
    – Numerous little ziplock baggies labeled, “Picasso’s fingernails” & “Picasso’s toenails”
    – Formica factory
    – A field of overgrown white clover

  • – Man in polo shirt and hard hat standing next to white cargo van
    – Action photograph of plastic cup stacking competition
    – Clipboards fanned out on a table
    – A tall glass of water in front of a closed miniblind window
    – Clown with clown pants covered in cake
    – Parking lot covered in carpet samples

  • – Marble painted like the Earth between a businessman’s forefinger and thumb
    – Same marble in a baby’s mouth
    – Monkeys sitting around a campfire in boyscout uniforms
    – An overweight housewife hauling a 50# bag of certified organic flower fertilizer on her shoulder, oversized SUV in near distance
    – Multicolored sandwich toothpicks with US flags stuck in a sandcastle shaped like the whitehouse
    – All 26 letters of the alphabet drawn using cat hairballs and vomit
    – A stack of hundreds in a bear trap with dried blood on the teeth
    – A pine tree with a cold, sneezing pine tar into a pond
    – Extreme close-ups in high resolution of cable news personalities’ mouths
    – Hotel toilet paper origami instructions