Chaos! Panic! Pandemonium!

My first concept was to have an Agent of Disaster standing in front of a ruined streetscape commenting on the destruction he --or she-- had wrought. The streetscape at least was easy enough.

It started with a ground line...

...some buildings.

...a car smashed into a light pole.

...a busted fire hydrant gushing water.

...a damaged plane plunging earthward.

...terrified people running in every direction.

...flames and smoke shooting out the windows of the buildings.

...and finally a firey sky shading from orange to yellow.

Creating a figure to pose as the Agent of Disaster was more difficult. Originally I'd had a vague image of an insufferably cute, flirty, but sexless child. Something in a "Disney meets Anime" kind of mold. But alas, as always the problem was I couldn't draw it. Oh I attempted some sketches of large wet eyes set in large round heads, and searched the Internet for images like those below that might inspire decisions about the exact combination of facial features needed to bring it off, but the whole package just wouldn't come together for me.

After several unproductive days I decided I was making things too complicated for myself. It was more important to get the design into circulation than to make sure it was somehow iconic and archetypal enough. At bottom what I wanted was an incongruous juxtaposition. The widely known --and better yet, public domain-- big yellow smiley face would carry that freight just fine. Besides which, there was no reason I couldn't go on tinkering with the cute/flirty/sexless concept as inspiration allowed.

The standard yellow smiley face had its origins in the 1960s. The one popularized in the 1970s looked like this:

There are now endless variations. Mine has a couple basic changes:
- Slightly offset eyes, with a tinge of maroon around the edges.
- A lopsided mouth without dimples, open to speak.




- A shadow around the perimeter of the yellow circle to give an illusion of depth, completing the image.

And that was that.
After applying the slogan, my final design looked like this:





For about a month.

Then I started to rethink my approach. It seems a helluva lot of people are perfectly satisfied to wear a shirt with only text on it. I wouldn't be in this game if all I had to do was pick a font and type some funny slogan or other on a piece of cloth, but at the same time simplicity does have its virtues. Some might look at the design above and conclude it's too crowded and busy.

So I resolved that the text itself would become a design element. Chaos. Panic. Pandemonium. The words themselves could be made to look like the thing they described, right? It was time to dive into my 4,000 Fonts disk and look for likely candidates.

I settled on these:



Which became this after some adjustments:

The rest was easy enough: Put my smiley in the middle, and make all the words curve around it.

Here was the end result:

There was one other experiment I wanted to try before wrapping up: a female version. Granted, this cut against my original cute/flirty/sexless concept, but since that concept is on indefinite hiatus there is no reason not to explore alternatives.

I changed a few things around to make this smiley...



And put a flower font underneath her...



Which turned out to be unreadable when reduced to thumbnail size.

So I went with this:

I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but all three are available at my store, which is:

Here are a few of my other lenses, in amongst the rubble and debris.

Illustrated Aphorisms

A lens describing the sequence of accidents, blunders, crises, disasters, excuses, failures, goof-ups, hassles, imbroglios, jumbles, kerfuffles, lies, mistakes, numbskulleries, obfuscations, pratfalls, quarrels, reversals, snafus, tantrums, ulcerations, vacillations, and whimsies that led to the establishment of Illustrated Aphorisms, my store at CafePress.

Money Talks!
A t-shirt design commenting on the tragedy of personal wealth.



We Are All Africans
Race, human evolution, and another t-shirt design.



Bury Me Face Down
A t-shirt design about presenting your best "face" to the world after you're dead.



Sharp Tongue, Dull Mind
A t-shirt design to diss ranting idjits.



Eat Right, Stay Fit, Die Anyway
A t-shirt design that clarifies the futility of healthy lifestyle choices.



Artificial Intelligence
A t-shirt design that explains why smart machines have more to fear from us than we do from them.



Deep Trouble
When you're in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut.



The Temeraire Series
A book series about the exploits of a dragon and his human during the Napoleonic wars, and my observations thereof.

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