The Dead South: Concert Posters
Poster Design #1
For this assessment, I chose to create my posters for an upcoming concert at my workplace, Big Sky Brewing Company. The Dead South are a folk/bluegrass band from Saskatchewan, Canada. I decided on an image of a guitar to experiment with for my first poster design. In Illustrator I was able to use the pen and curvature tools to outline the main parts of the guitar. I then used the type-on-a-path tool to write on the lines I had created. I chose a combination of decorative “old western” style typefaces and a simple sans serif typeface.
I decided on blue as the main colour in my design – it might have been a little literal being a bluegrass band it made sense at the time and I ended up really liking the end result. I chose orange as a complimentary colour to highlight important information on the poster. I finished my design in Photoshop by adding a texture – I had the perfect old paper texture with a splotch that I positioned right where the hole in the guitar would be.
Overall, I really like the look of this first poster design. I tried to keep it relatively simple and minimalistic in the style of Alan Fletcher.
Poster Design #2
My second poster design was influenced by Alan Fletcher’s poster for the 20th ICOGRADA Seminar (see below). I split the page into four columns to represent the four members of the band. I used a photo of the band which I edited in Illustrator using Image Trace and then superimposed lyrics from one of the bands songs onto the image.
In place of the hand in Fletcher’s design, I wanted to use the name of the band as a main focal point. I ended up using a large decorative script font and finished the design with a texture in Photoshop. I also went with a similar colour scheme – blue with red to highlight important text.
This ended up being very successful and I really liked the end result. I pulled back on the colours and used a lot of white space creating a minimalistic yet interesting poster design. I decided to use this second poster design and adapt it to a piece of signage for the concert.
