From The Desk of Nathan Monk

In January 2012 I was asked to take part in the second incarnation of Pointe Blank. I happily agreed after enjoying creating my Coppélia piece so much last time.

Problem #1: I was really quite busy over at SMILE, working long nights to try and grow the client base. In January I took on more projects than I could cope with, but the short timeframes that came in meant that we couldn't outsource. Inevitably, my Pointe Blank became a low priority task that was left until my next available free-time.

Problem #2: A few days before deadline I knew that it was now or never. "I'll do it at home" I thought to myself. Got home. Tried to load up my computer. "Sad face. SAD FACE! YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME." My Mac had decided to fail on me. After me joking about my trusty MacBook being so good to last nearly the length of my longstanding relationship with my girlfriend - it decides to play practical jokes on me now?

This is a story of my process but also of my pain. I like to think of myself as a problem solver. Good job, because I had a pretty big problem.

So my mac was dead. I couldn't wait any longer though as I knew that it just wasn't possible to do it in any less time. I grabbed my iPad and started to put my research together. This wasn't so much of a problem. I looked at the brief and decided to watch as many versions as possible online. So at this point I had a basic understanding of style and narrative structure but I was really interested in how the story could b broken down. I wanted to know, in it's basic form, what was this a story about?

I started to really get into it and I'd find new things almost hourly.

Eventually, I believed that the story was not about shoes, the period setting was irrelevant. It was a story about the relationship between Hobson and Mossop. Everyone else merely facilitate this narrative. As the title suggests it is a story about a Hobsons Choice (as well as a nice little wordplay) which Mossop offers. The whole piece is building up to this pivotal moment.

I profiled every character and started musing new ideas about the characters. I'm sure that some would say that I went too far and started creating my own subtexts but my interpretations are legitimate suggestions based on the information that I had.

• Hobson is old and presumptuous, his business stale - and his practices are questionable.
• Mossop is lean, young and talented and ready to take a calculated risk. However, he is used and suffers from a lack of identity.
• Magie is the median. She is both used (by her father Hobson), and the user (she practically imposes that Will marries her).

Hobsons Choice is not a story of love nor a story of talent, and certainly not of shoes. It is about independence - the theme that runs though each and every characters past, present and future. In the case of Hobson and Mossop, this is independence is portrayed though a power struggle for business dominance. The power switch of Hobson and Mossop is the defining moment - the Hobsons Choice.

I started looking at the Victorian period for stylistic influences. Typographic references led me to Clarendon, a popular font of the period. I was struggling with an overarching style until I started reading about "Victorian Critical Theory".

"...reflected the ideological upheaval that was present within society as a whole. New advances in empirical sciences such as biology and geology gave rise to questions about the nature of reality and previous ideas about religion and truth were called into question." eNotes

This was really interesting. Of course in the Victorian era there was the Aesthetic Movement, which is essentially "Art for Art's sake". So I guess you could argue, that the piece actually didn't have to have any meaning at all, but I wanted a cohesive link between this poster and my last submission. Last time I used triangular tiles to create an image. This time I could develop that concept by using the Delaunay triangulation whist keeping a link to nature of reality and advances in understanding.

Upon looking into Delaunay triangulation if found the work of Jonathan Puckley. He created this totally badass Illustrator algorithm.

This wasn't helping me, because the lack of a computer at home meant I didn't have the time to create a new action. So I took to Google to see what tools were available for content creation on the iPad. It must have been my lucky day because I found Poly™. Poly™ just so hapening to be an iPad app that allows you to create images based on Delaunay triangulation.

On a side note: Jonathan Puckley does seem a bit precious (check the comments) about this graphical process, so I hope he doesn't see this piece!

So with all of the references that I've talked about, I drafted out a piece on my iPad and headed back into the SMILE studio. After a long night and a Big John's, I created this:

I know that given some more time I could have developed thi and made some layout choices with more copy. But given that 80% was done on an iPad - I'm pretty happy with it.