Everyone loves a parade. When I was a kid, my hometown had lots of them, which I watched from my Dad’s ninth story office window. It was part of what made the city part connected to the rural part.
My wife and I recently saw a ball game in Cincinnati, and the downtown was amazing—clean, resplendent with gardens and blooming flowers. We heard few honking horns if any, and people actually stopped and talked to us for no particular reason. Them's my type of folk! There were at least two different concerts going on by the riverfront, one Soul and one Celtic, and if you stood in the middle ground and listened to both at the same time you might have thought you were at a Next-Gen Fifth Dimension concert with Joan Bias as the lead singer. After a couple of days watching the urban friendliness, I felt like I was part of the urban renewal program, sort of like the witness protection program for parade lovers. I leapt into the street with my real identity, wearing a funny hat, toting a ridiculously opalescent balloon, and waving at little kids, petting Dobermans, and chewing gum I picked off banisters just like Elf.
Parades are, in themselves, a unique form of entertainment. In no other venue or activity do people form a line and promenade down the street to advertise their allegiance to anything from boom boxes (Willimantic, Connecticut) to underwear (a tiny unmentionable town in Ohio). Apparently in America, anyone can start a parade, just like a lemonade stand, without fear of imprisonment, or social distancing.
The piece you are looking at here, (title, top), was worked on over the span of three years. I kept adding and subtracting from it, trying to acquaint myself with what it was about. The use of alliteration aids us in getting through the long title, and despite the use of trash, poorly drawn stick figures and haphazard marks, the result is still a carefully constructed design. For example, you’ll notice that there is movement stepwise up from the left corner, and the same kind of movement going up from the right corner. Together, the two imaginary paths cross thereby forcing your eye to move up and down in the picture even though the main characters are happily and parading horizontally and purposely on the bottom deckled edge.
Good design is a lot like a good parade: they both easily transport us to the land of make-believe. Consider this quote from one of my favorite comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, taken from an episode of Comedians and Cars Getting Coffee:
Even if you are doing something that looks fun, there is still a serious process underneath it that is driving the craft. So, even though I am cracking jokes, I am fine tuning them with my timing, my choice of words, my delivery.
Thankfully, you do not have to drive to Cincinnati or get coffee with Jerry to be a part of my particular parade. Just purposely pull up a sidewalk, put on your particular go-to hat and watch the performance. Somewhere in the middle, where the black X hits the starfish, hit your urban pause button. You may hear the Fifth Dimension singing “Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…”