Client:
Times Square Alliance / AIGA NY / Worldstudio Foundation

Product:
Banner

Medium:
Outdoor

Description:
Design Times Square: The Urban Forest Project brightened the avenues and side streets around Times Square with 185 banners created by some of the world’s most celebrated designers, artists, photographers, and illustrators. The banner-creators sought to make powerful visual statements on the theme of “tree.” Seen together in their context, the 185 banners formed a forest of thought-provoking images at one of the world’s busiest, most energetic, and emphatically urban intersections.

Esquer took inspiration from Emily Dickinson. The net of vine-like structures in his banner opens at its center to form the words “Forever Now,” creating a verbal and visual allusion to Dickinson’s lines,

Forever might be short
I thought, to show,
And so I pieced it with a flower now.


The flowering letterforms, custom-designed by Esquer, evoke the graphic exuberance of the vegetable world.

Following their 3-month display, the banners were recycled into tote bags and sold at auction, with proceeds going to scholarship and mentoring programs that benefit students of the visual arts.