Jenny’s bachelor thesis '100 gestresste Plakate' is a self-invented experiment deeply based on cognitive therapy to overcome her own dysfunctional perfectionism.

The work consists of an action-related and a thought-related part. Within the thought-related part, she consciously confronted herself with her constant perfectionistic fears. In the action-related part, her self-set task was to design event posters for events that she did not know before, under very strong time pressure. During each task, she recorded her thoughts and then transferred them to her developed questionnaire based on cognitive therapy. Using this, she compared her own assumptions with reality and identified thinking errors in them in order to restructure them.

The goal of this work was to create imperfection tolerance, to gain new perspectives, to expand her design repertoire, to take away the fear of mistakes for herself and others and to recognize and discard dysfunctional thinking patterns.

The title „100 stressed posters“ is an ironic allusion to the famous competition „100 best posters“ because this work is exactly about the opposite, it’s about trying to learn to live with not being the best. Instead, the title describes the state of mind Jenny felt during the whole work - incredibly stressed ;)

This work was awarded the 1st Design Prize by the HTWG Konstanz.

See more close-up posters here.