10 design rules I follow when creating my Songs that Gong poster series

In case you haven't seen this project yet, let me give you a quick overview. Songs that Gong is a personal project: a series of posters where the guest stars are fragments of song lyrics, reframed into new phrases. I've always collected small pieces of lyrics that move me or stay with me, and one day I decided to make them visible in a visual way, which is, after all, what I love and what I know how to do.

While building the series around a few very basic foundations, I kept adding things that made it feel more like a series. They're not rules in the strict sense of the word, more like principles that help me hold my ground when I'm standing in front of a blank sheet of paper with a marker in my hand.

Here are the ten.

Rule #1: Total permission.

It's hard when you've been trained with so many rules and now you allow yourself to break them. That's exactly where everything starts: break the rules. Anything goes.

If I don't need margins, I don't use them. Words can bleed off the edge, overlap the static info on the poster, go crooked, stack on top of each other. They're free. The complete absence of rules is valid and necessary if that's what the piece calls for.

Rule #2: Silence has weight.

Just as silence matters in music, white space matters in design. This rule is about that: holding the white space, not filling it just because. Not panicking when there's visual silence. White also says things, and learning to let it be there was one of the hardest parts of this series.

Rule #3: Illegible is not invisible.

The fundamental thing here is knowing that the message is everything. So we can play with legibility, but the message still has to land. If the letters overlap, the words are barely readable, and gesture dominates over text, the rule is that there has to be a clear and legible version of what matters somewhere in the piece, and in this case, that happens in Helvetica. The undisputed queen. Humble, austere, clean and direct. It steps back so everything else can shine. The message always lands. That's why I choose it.

Rule #4: Chaos needs anchors.

For a series to exist and be recognized as one, there have to be common threads between the pieces, some small consistencies.

I mentioned using Helvetica to bring clarity to the chaos. Along the same lines, I also use it for the fixed information on every poster: poster number, which song it draws from, tagline, url. We could keep adding but that's not the core of these posters, it's a small informational accent that gives stability to the whole piece. A few fixed points within the chaos that give the series unity and make each piece feel like part of something bigger.

Rule #5: Details are what make people fall in love.

Delicious details. Brushstrokes. Drops of tempera. Textures that weren't planned and stayed because they added something. The real, placed inside a piece. These are the details that make someone lean in to look closer. Wow effect: on.

Rule #6: Think in meters, not pixels.

While contrast, color and design in general make a piece more or less visually compelling, how a piece comes together is very different when you picture it hanging on a wall at a specific size. In my case, I imagine them at no less than 1m x 1.50m: proper big. Or on the side of a building (real proper big). Designing with that scenario in mind changes everything: the scale, the gesture, the visual weight. Not for a phone screen, but for a real space.

Rule #7: Send strength, not flowers.

No room for romantic messages here. Yes to inspiration, drive, and force. To seeing something on a wall that does something to you on the inside, but not to sentimentality. The phrases I choose have to have something that blows your face off. That wakes you up. That opens something.

Rule #8: Why first, how second.

I don't start building without knowing where I'm going. The protagonist is the gesture, the word that shakes you, but not every phrase says the same thing or has the same force, or the same way of being resolved. Everything else falls into place around that.

Rule #9: If the process stops being fun, it shows.

Inspiration is everything. The inspiration that comes from seeing them finished feeds the desire to keep going. If at any point the process starts to feel like an obligation, something is going wrong.

Rule #10: Tension is balance.

Balance between opposites is key so nothing ends up being too much of anything: too gestural, too timid, too much color, too much texture. Hard and soft. Minimal and loaded. Structured and spontaneous. That tension is what keeps the pieces from being either too cold or too chaotic. They live in the middle, and that's exactly where I want them.

Songs that Gong is coming soon to Instagram at @songsthatgong. I'll leave the link so you can see how it's coming along.

And if you want to listen to the songs behind each piece, the playlist is on Spotify. It's collaborative, so feel free to jump in.

After this recipe, all that's left is to get your hands dirty and let the creativity out. I think these rules apply to a much bigger spectrum than "some posters." Build your own rules, break some conventions.

J.