Great Balls of Flaming Volcanic Lava Fire Cash— that’s what I wanted to call this promotion. I thought the time was right for a tongue-in-cheek promotion. I wanted to send out a postcard with a wink and an elbow nudge. Something that was so obviously over the top that everyone would know it was a joke. It shows confidence in yourself and trust in your viewer when you send an ironic message. Put that trust in your viewer and there a good chance they gain a bit more trust in you. Plus, it never hurts to poke a little fun at yourself.

At least, that was the idea. Turns out that it’s impossible, or at least beyond my design skill, to press the icons of fire and cash together without activating an idea of flaming money. Burning your hard earned cash is not a message a casino would ever want to send. Full stop, reverse engines.

In baseball and design it is important to touch all of the bases. Even if you think you just hit a first ball fastball out of the park with a real juicy concept, it is vital to stick to process. In this case, even though I knew I was gong to do Great Balls of Flaming Volcanic Lava Fire Cash (and rock it), I still had a short creative meeting with my CD. In that meeting, before I presented my fabulous fire idea, she had suggested A-Maze-ing cash as a promotion theme. With time running short I had that idea fall back on. The end result was a very nice piece done in record time.

One other little tidbit I learned from this project — perspective always matters. In the proof version of this postcard I created the maze out of a very random assortment of bills. I worked it over and over and could not make it look right. It was just plain messy. For a while I was just going to run with it. But, it bothered me so I had to keep working it, even after first proof. Sometime after that I figured it out. It looked messy because it looked unreal. I failed to obey the physical laws that even made up spaces are required to follow. Looking down on the postcard, the laws of perspective say that two bills siting next to each other, forming the walls of a maze, should be roughly the same size. If one is significantly smaller it must be father away. It would be a fairly poor maze if the segments of a single wall were separated by spaces large enough to engage your sense of perspective. After figuring this out, the fix was easy. Make all of the different bills roughly the same size. Presto! Clean, neat and done!