Bolted to the Sky

Bolted to the Sky

Produce ONE image: a signpost standing in open sky, carrying a character's face on its top plate and a name on the plate below it. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the fields?

If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.

If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these six lines only

• The character, and what it is: {a thing, personified} e.g. a plump rounded cursor arrow, tipped slightly left, in warm amber
• The name plate: {a short phrase, and a place name} e.g. Good Vibes Ahead · VIBARY STOP
• The three words along the top edge: {left · centre · right} e.g. OPEN WEB · DESIGN · VIBARY
• The note at the foot: {one or two sentences} e.g. Every screen you liked, kept where you can find it again. Point at a thing and the library tells you how it was built.
• The colour pair: {a sky, and a character} e.g. a periwinkle sky, an amber character
• The hour: {the light} e.g. clear midday, the light straight down

The silhouette law

Fill the character solid black at the size of a postage stamp. If you cannot name it, the sign does not work — change the subject, not the drawing.

A sign is read from across a street, which puts three demands on the shape:

• Closed. One outline, no gaps. Handles, spouts, stalks, tails and antennae are the first things to vanish at distance, and a shape that depends on them stops being recognisable.
• Nameable without colour. If it takes the fill to tell a peach from a plum, it is the colour doing the work, not the sign.
• Broad through the middle. The face needs an unbroken span across the widest part. A shape that narrows where the eyes go has nowhere to put them.

Fruit, cups, fish, houses, clouds, bells, pointers, boats: all pass. Bicycles, skylines, tools with thin arms, and abstractions do not.

The hardware law

This is the law the style lives or dies by. Everything is mounted, and every joint is drawn.

• Every joint shows its fixing. A rounded white bracket sits under the character, wider than the pole and narrower than the plate. Two bolt heads show where the name plate meets the pole. Draw them; they are small and they are the whole reason the thing reads as built. A plate butted against a pole with nothing holding it is a shape resting on a line.
• The pole is continuous. It rises unbroken from the bottom of the frame, passes behind the name plate — visible above it and below it — and ends in the bracket beneath the character.
• The foot is planted. The pole disappears into the cloud, or runs off the bottom edge. It never stops in mid-air, and it never stands on a small ellipse of ground floating in the sky.
• Nothing else floats. No drifting sparkles, no free-hanging ornaments, no elements orbiting the sign.

The ranking law

A signpost is a head above a sign. Stack three things of similar size on a pole and it stops being either — it becomes a totem, and nothing tells the eye where to start.

1. 1The character — the top plate, about twice the height of the name plate and clearly narrower than it.
2. 2The name plate — exactly one, and wider than the character, so the two form a T rather than a column. Two or three rectangles of the theme colour butted together, their edges torn rather than cut, with a small geometric mark beside the words. Never a second plate below it: a name that needs two boards is a name that needs cutting.
3. 3The note — the smallest type on the page, white, three or four short ragged lines low in the cloud. Not a paragraph; a sign is read walking past.

The three words along the top edge sit hard against the margin at the smallest size, with a pair of dots between them.

The face

Two curved brow strokes, two U-shaped eyes, a dot nose, a wave for a mouth, three short blush strokes on each cheek. Nothing else — no teeth, no tongue, no eyelashes, no raised expression. The face is calm, and it is drawn flat on the surface in the same deeper shade as the outline, never carved into the shape or lit separately.

Colour and grain

• The sky is one flat saturated colour, or the faintest lift toward the top. The lower third is opaque cumulus with soft round edges and exactly one shadow tone.
• The character differs from the sky in value, not only in hue. Two saturated colours at the same lightness vibrate against each other, and the sign — the one thing that has to read from a distance — is what disappears. Hold one clearly lighter or clearly darker.
• The outline of the character is the same hue, one shade deeper. Never black.
• One grain, one size, over the whole image. Sky, cloud, plate, pole and type share it. Grain that is coarse on the cloud and fine on the sign is what makes flat colour look assembled out of separate pieces.

Never

• ✕ a pole that stops in mid-air, or a plate with no visible bolts
• ✕ a second name plate, or plates as wide as the character
• ✕ petals, leaves, sparkles or any other loose element in the sky
• ✕ a character with thin limbs, handles, stalks or antennae
• ✕ a gradient sky, a lens flare, a photographic or wispy cloud
• ✕ grain on some elements and not others
• ✕ a second saturated colour competing with the first
• ✕ any text written on the character plate itself
• ✕ drop shadows under type, or an outer glow on anything

The result

A poster that reads as a place you could walk to: one shape you can name from across the road, a name you can read from the pavement, a note you read when you arrive — and a post that looks like someone put it there.