You Are Being Deceived

In 2011, IDW Comics split the Transformers comic into two ongoing series. The war was over, and the Autobots were victorious. So now, how does Cybertron rebuild itself? One was a political thriller set on a rebuilding the Transformers’ homeworld, Cybertron (Subtitled “Robots in Disguise”); and one was a crew of characters having wacky adventures in space (subtitled “More than Meets the Eye”).

MTMTE included flashbacks to pre-war Cybertron, where the Autobot ruling class was a corrupt government of bureaucrats who kept voting to give themselves more power and the lower classes less and less. A group of rebels who saw what was happening kept spraypainting “You are being deceived” everywhere, trying to open the eyes of the citizenry to what was really happening. Based on this slogan, the rebel group became known as the “Decepticons.”

It seemed as reasonable a thing to make a retro-style poster out of as any.

But are YOU being deceived?

The whole piece was created in Adobe Photoshop — There’s lots of pretty self-explanatory background imagery that I tried to keep looking like the 1987-1988 Decepticon purple-and-teal color combination, but also utilizing elements found in sci-fi design from about 1984-1985; The broken sun, the broken plane, the grid, and the twinkling stars. The Decepticon shield was re-created by me using the polygonal lasso tool over a very blown-up image that was way too pixelated to use. The Japanese text at the bottom is the Japanese logo for the original TFs cartoon (also recreated with the polygonal lasso tool), and the circuitboard border is based on a stock image that I re-created and altered/simplified a bit to avoid pixellation. “You Are Being” is written in the original Transformers logo font, with “Deceived” in a font that resembled spraypaint — This was both to tie it in to the phrase’s comic origin, as well as to mimic late-80s logo design.

It took several hours to complete, but I rather like the final product.

The Transformers, Decepticons, etc., are registered trademarks of Hasbro, inc.