Five-minute posters

Inspirational quotes: particularly across social media, and particularly at this time of year, it's impossible to avoid them; most of them sickly, stupid and strikingly uninspiring. Thierry Brunfaut, however, has succeed in creating a series of posters which carry maxims that don't test your gag reflex – 20 of them, in fact. And he did so in under 100 minutes.

Brunfaut, a partner at creative studio Base, produced the posters to a strict set of rules: each must be designed in under 300 seconds, the result immediately posted on the studio's Twitter and Facebook page."This time constraint forces immediate design decisions," Brunfaut says. "One type, no color, lower or upper-case, block or aligned, big or small. Five minutes. And not a second more."

All of the quotes – which range from design advice to observations on modern life – are set in Base’s signature typeface, Baseville: maxims and barbs such as "Design for free? Problems for Free" and "Your logo is a no-go" and "Why use Instagram when you can use a pictogram".

Working across graphic design, art direction, audiovisuals, copywriting and typeface design, Base's client include everyone from Kanye West and Yves-Saint Laurent to the Museum of Modern Art and the European Socialist Party.

Despite the studio's impressive clientele, Brunfaut was wary of the project seeming too po-faced. “I always like it when it doesn't sound too serious," he concludes. "It has to be light.”