Love, without the easy symbol. For this poster, I wanted to start Valentine's week differently — not with the expected imagery, not with the clean and reassuring visual language we've all grown up associating with love. The starting point was this slightly absurd idea when you think about it: "where feelings supposedly live". We all associate emotions and feelings with the heart, even though the actual organ looks nothing like the symbol we've built around it. That gap between the real and the imagined felt worth exploring. I wanted to place something true, something almost uncomfortable, at the center of a celebration that usually thrives on softness. A realistic heart, almost raw, sitting where a pretty symbol would normally be. The black background didn't work — it felt too obvious, too easy. Color tests didn't convince me either. Then the idea of kiss marks arrived, and everything shifted. It brought a tension between intimacy and unease that felt right for the subject.

In Photoshop, I worked with posterize, a lot of textures layered carefully to achieve a crumpled paper and grain effect, then adjustments in color balance, exposure and brightness/contrast to find the right mood. The most complex part was the typography. Making a wave effect work without losing legibility is already a challenge on its own, but the bigger difficulty was achieving a real dialogue between two very different typefaces — a script and a thick sans-serif. These two have completely different personalities, different weights, different rhythms. Making them coexist without one crushing the other required a lot of back-and-forth, testing spacing, sizing, placement. The goal was tension, not harmony — but a controlled tension, where both voices are heard. This poster doesn't try to define love. It questions it. With a deliberately unsettling visual, far from the imagery people expect when they think of Valentine's Day.

WIP