A poster for a microtheater play

It had been a while since I'd done anything closer to graphic design. Working in product you spend all day on screens, flows, systems — interesting stuff, but it feels pretty far from the artistic side of design, if you can even call it that. It was nice to do something like this again and actually enjoy it.

We started on Pinterest looking for references — not to copy anything, but because when two people say "I have an idea in my head" they usually mean two completely different things. Getting to the same visual language before touching anything was the first real step.

From there we used AI tools (GPT, Nanobanana) to generate quick rough sketches. Nothing polished, just enough to see what each of us actually had in mind. It turned out to be a pretty efficient way to align early without going back and forth forever on descriptions.

The concept — two heads facing each other on a couch — came from us. Once we had that clear, the illustration was done on the iPad. Then I took it into Figma and started building around it: testing different typefaces, trying different layouts, going through a lot of color combinations.

You can see some of the iterations in the screenshots. We went through pink, green, red, blue before landing on the yellow.

AI is good and can generate decent results, but most of the time it's not exactly what you have in your head. So it ends up being useful in the same way a mood board is — not as the answer, but as a way to sketch the idea and spark new ones.

To sum up I honestly miss making things like this more often where the only metric is whether it looks right for you.