This is somewhat derivative of the last poster I designed for Firecracker Jazz Band, but we needed one for our weekly performances at Olive or Twist so I came up with this design. Whipped this out in about an hour.
There’s a new club opening up in Asheville, the Arcade Asheville, in the location of the old and much mourned Joli Rouge and they are planning to have raging dance parties every Friday night. For a dance party to rage, you need the right DJs and they landed the best in town. By best, I mean with the best taste and widest appeal. They got Marley and my good friend Par. I’ve worked for Par’s former project, Under One Beat Productions, and designed lots of posters and other documents for them. So he called me up and said he found the best image ever to use as the basis for a poster. And he’s right, this photograph is dope. Super dope. It inspired this design.
Been trying to beef up the ol’ portfolio lately, and this was just the sort of project I was looking for.
Speaking of that, you should check out my portfolio.
Good friends Screaming Js, the house band at MoDaddy’s, needed a poster to help with some promotion. So they asked me to put something together, and this is what I did. I tweaked the type (I used Blackmoor) and stole the piano from the 1902 Sears, Roebuck Catalogue. They liked it, I liked it and I think it represents their music pretty well.
You can catch them, and often me, tonight at MoDaddy’s and every Wednesday. They put on a kickin good show, and you owe it to yourself to catch these guys. And it’s free. See you there!
Jon Corbin of the Firecracker Jazz Band asked me to design a new poster for the band. I love designing a poster and the Firecrackers are my favorite local band, so it was a really fun project. I was initially going to go art deco, but that’s a hard milieu to swim and make it look classy and not cheesy, so I abandoned it pretty quickly.
Typography has always been my strength in design, so instead of being frustrated, I resorted to what I knew. The only typeface used is Rockwell, which looks great pulled, pushed enlarged, suggested, shown, etc. I don’t think I’ve used Rockwell previously, but it is certainly in my palette now. Only six words are used and three images, including the piano aflame image by Jason Krekel that they use as a logo.
Problem solving + creativity = design.
I love doing it.
Here’s some of my inspiration. Smashing Magazine: Breathtaking Typographic Posters
Just wrapped up this poster on Thursday for jar-e, an Asheville musician. Par (who is co-celebrating a birthday with me) hooked me up with this job. I’ve really been working on improving my Illustrator chops, and it’s nice to be rewarded with a little bit of paying work. Hopefully this leads to more! Look for it around town. If you see it, take your picture standing next to it and send it to me, I’ll buy you your choice of coffee or beer.
One of my favorite pieces of political design, and certainly the best to come out of this country in a long time (have to give it up to some of those Stalinist era Soviet posters; see http://sovietposter.blogspot.com notice Valentina Kulagina’s work, of the Lenin period) is the Barack Obama PROGRESS screenprint poster done by Shepard Fairey.
So it was with particular delight that I ran across this: Make your own Obama Poster
Some of my ideas:
