I’m a total pop music junkie, so this design assignment (1.5 stars), to take an image from The Big Picture and overlay it with a Top 100 song, seemed like an obvious choice for me.

I picked the number one song, which just happens to be my number one song of the moment: One Dance, by Drake. Like pretty much every Drake song, One Dance offers us a weird mixture of Drake being simultaneously sentimental and wanting to party. He’s always giving off confusing vibes; I’m never sure if he is asking to be taken seriously or is just looking for a good time. I’m not complaining, I love his music, but I’m also not afraid to make fun of his strange saccharine-party-boy persona.

I looked through a lot of images from The Big Picture. Most of them were very serious and would have been inappropriate to overlay with Drake lyrics. The image I chose spoke to me immediately; it’s a beautiful photograph with soft early morning golden-hour lighting, and the dog jumping up the tree made me smile. After overlaying the Drake lyrics, the picture’s drama became nonsensical in a way that made me smile even more.

It doesn’t make any sense, and that’s kind of the point. Drake’s shallow sentimentality doesn’t make any sense to me either, and I tried to reflect that absurdism in the design:

Process:

Using GIMP made this assignment very simple.

First, I opened the Boston Globe image in GIMP.

Then, selecting ‘Text’ from the toolbar, I added in the lyrics. Inspired by Vignelli’s cannon, I chose Helvetica, one of his five acceptable font choices. I decreased the kerning because I find tight lettering to be more visually appealing. I thought having the text in the middle of the image but justified to the left (another Vignelli tip!) added nice balance without being too obvious.