It’s Never To Late To Change Direction
This coming Saturday, I’m running. I used to proudly proclaim that I only run when being chased, but that changed earlier this year for two reasons.
Archive for the ‘freelance’ category
The Sweet Spot Between Freelance & In-House
A few weeks ago, I met up with some folks who all attended the HOW Creative Freelancer Conference in Chicago this summer. Every freelancer I’ve met has been eager to know how other freelancers work because we’re always trying to improve our own skill sets. So it’s really educational for me getting to know other freelance designers in the city. In some ways, we deal with many of the same challenges—design challenges, dealing well with clients, looking for new work—but we’re also all very different in our focuses and skills.
BoHo Season Brochure
In my last post, I unveiled BoHo Theatre’s 11/12 season poster design along with a subscription postcard I whipped up at the last minute. Well here is the piece that normally would have been used instead of the postcard: the full season brochure. Whereas the postcard was just a teaser, displaying only the show names and posters and then providing a subscription form, the brochure is much more of a storytelling piece that gives you in-depth information. The postcard is something that can be handed out at shows to people who are already getting the BoHo experience; the brochure is for people to pickup on the other side of town and learn about the company.
I had wanted to do a double gate fold for the company last year, and this year I finally got the chance. I love the gate fold because of the way it allows new things to be revealed. For the storyteller in me, it allows for the reveal to happen in controlled stages: “this happens, and then this happens…” Open the brochure and you get info on the company, subscriptions, and the annual holiday show, open it again and you get a big 8.5″ x 14″ spread showcasing the productions.
For this season’s design, I’m skewing more grunge than I have in the past. My reasoning behind it is that the company has always been a small, scrappy powerhouse that gets great reviews and awards, but has stayed bohemian and a little underground. The grunge aesthetic just fits. Kind of like the Guy Richie Sherlock Holmes movies. For this piece, I picked up a paisley grunge background and manipulated it into three different colors for the three stages of reveal (it’s called getting your money’s worth out of stock imagery!).
On a side note, apparently a giant showcase of my work is now available at Theater Wit in Lakeview. Wit is where BoHo performs, so this brochure and the postcard are there. It’s also where Emerald City holds some of their summer camps, so their season brochure and If You Give A Cat A Cupcake direct mail piece that I designed are there as well. Finally, Remy Bumppo’s season brochure found it’s way to the advert rack. Considering all of these companies are aiming for a different demographic, I can happily say none of my work is competing with each other.
BoHo Theatre Season Design
It’s time to unveil my third season design this year, this one for BoHo Theatre. Unlike my previous season design clients, BoHo is a modest storefront theatre which has excelled at seeming bigger than they are through innovative artistry in sets and costumes, and by attracting top-notch actors with an artist-friendly environment. Since joining the company two years ago, my goal has been to elevate the marketing collateral of the company to the same level.
This year was the first year that the company’s founding artistic director was unable to complete designs for the upcoming season shows (he’s off renovating his new home in Italy; we should all be so unfortunate). Though he left me small works-in-progress, I decided to go in a different direction. The first major public reveal of these new, finalized images was on this season subscription postcard (shown above), distributed at the company’s annual benefit and recent shows. It will be followed by a full double-gate fold brochure, but this was an intermediary step. To get this printed quickly at a low price, I went with Vistaprint, a company whose print quality on even the simplest projects I have not approved of in the past. However, the printing on this job was superb and the turn-around lightning quick. I was pleasantly surprised.
But enough about the postcard. Let’s take a closer look at these posters…
Print portfolio update
Just a quick update to hype the fact that I’ve finally updated my print portfolio. I threw some new stuff into it a couple months ago when I had a job interview, but this time I’ve actually taken a smidgeon of time to make sure the fonts are more closely aligned with my new branding, seen on this blog, my portfolio site, and my new business cards. The title page you see here contains all the elements of my business card meshed into one single image. If you’re interested, skip on over to www.GrabBagMedia.com and download the new PDF from any of the section header links (it’s about 7 megs, FYI).
