Money Talks!

Logically, any design about money should have a picture of some actual money in it. Like say, the US dollar. But the Secret Service, in addition to protecting presidents, also protects our currency. They get kind of twitchy about unauthorized reproductions of the dollar image. And more so about larger denominations thereof.


Not a problem. I just needed to use something that vaguely resembled a dollar but obviously wasn't. Something that 1) has a portrait of a Great Man 2) is varying shades of green 3) has circles, ovals, or some other closed shapes in the corners to host a numeric symbol.

The Great Man could be any great man provided it wasn't George Washington. So how about... Albert Einstein!

The rest wasn't especially complicated. Money is just a plain ol' rectangle after all. Circles in each of the lower corners, a balloon-looking thing in the upper left, a fancy shield in the upper right, a small bar on top, a trapezoid bar on the bottom, and portrait in the middle. Presto! Simulated money.

One of the things I'm still coming to terms with about the t-shirt biz is that lots of people buy shirts without any kind of image, so lots of designers don't bother with them. They just apply text to cloth and hang it out there. In a partial concession to this reality, I thought I'd spell the slogan using letters made of my fake cash.

Seventeen letters and a punctuation mark later I had this:

Doesn't it suck? I kind of thought so. Nevertheless, it's available at my store for now.

~*~

It sucked enough that I decided to add a graphic element after all: some cash running away from a wallet.

That made for a slightly more interesting design, but not much.

Toward the end of my increasingly futile attempts to flog the text version of Money Talks! into something compelling, it dawned on me the image of running money was an accidental step in the right direction. The way money says "goodbye" would make or break this design. Action. Motion. Drama. That's what it needed.

For once, I didn't spend a lot of time floundering around trying to decide what action or motion. Flight. The money would fly. The money would fly like a swarm of bats. Kind of like this one:

Except without as many spiky parts. I preferred a more subtle form suggestive of a bat.



Next, I jazzed up my rudimentary line drawing of a wallet with a little color:

The bat dollars would then fly out of the wallet. I decided that, rather than emerging fully formed, they would transform from rectangle to bat. The full transition had five steps:

The last bit, combining text and image, involved a lot of tedious adjustments to size and spacing so that they wouldn't obscure each other. I ended up with a mixed approach; image sometimes overlapped text, and text sometimes overlapped image. This gave the end result a little depth, an added bonus.

A lens describing the sequence of accidents, blunders, crises, disasters, failures, goof-ups, hassles, imbroglios, jumbles, kerfuffles, mistakes, pratfalls, reversals, and snafus that led to the establishment of Illustrated Aphorisms, my store at CafePress.