For this project, I wanted to highlight the importance of financial literacy. I started out testing different ideas that involve the dollar sign, the portraits on US money notes, glasses, and some financial terms. I tried different combinations to see which ones have more emphasis on the tie between finance and literacy. I find the ones with the glasses are clearer at conveying the idea of education and the portraits/dollar signs are good indication of the financial part.

I then continued to crop out all of the portraits on the US money notes and making them all into greyscale and also similar darkness so it prints evenly on riso.

I continued uploaded all of the portraits into p5 and start playing with different patterns. I had the idea that the p5 will generate a different portrait. I stared with just adding glasses that will appear randomly on the canvas. I also tried out ones that have the money signs in the background as a pattern. But both felt really flat so I decided to test on drawing out the glasses/portraits using the money signs.

I mapped the color of the dollar signs with the color of the original portraits and created the images through the pattern of these dollar signs. I also went on and applied this to the glasses and see how they turned out. I also made the font size of the dollar signs to be random so they also generate differently each time.

I continued to combine the two patterns for the portrait and the glasses together, but it felt like there were too much tiny details overlapping on top of each other and made it hard to read. So I had to only apply the pattern to one of the elements between the portraits and the glasses.

To give more context to poster, I added a border with “FinLit” around the canvas using a blackletter font to put emphasis on the academia.

Finally I thought it would be a good idea to show the patterns using the dollar sign only inside the lenses of the glasses so it felt like knowledge will help people see clearer and navigate through their finances more easily.