Archive for the ‘process’ category
So December 2011 popped up suddenly and unexpectedly last year, arriving way earlier than I anticipated. I quickly found myself envious of these fancy designers I saw who had the time and resources to create beautiful holiday cards to send to their clients and prospective clients. I really wanted to do something similar, but I had way too many commitments to allow me the time to make something worthwhile. December passed in a flurry and I lamented my inability to get this simple task done.
By the time I got myself some vacation, it was the week of Christmas, at which point sending holiday cards is just embarrassing. In this downtime, though, I realized that what I really wanted to say in my holiday cards had nothing to do with Christmas, Hannukah, etc. What I wanted to do say to all my clients was thank you for their business and for allowing me to represent their brand. I have some great clients, and it’s because of them that I had a successful first full year as a professional freelancer. The appropriate holiday for that kind of retrospection, I decided, was actually New Years, and I totally had time to send cards for New Years!
By this point, however, I didn’t have the time or resources to create something big and fancy. What I did have lying around, however, was some leftover cardstock from when I published my own comics years and years (and years) ago. It’s a card stock that resembles cheap brown paper, a reference to the grab bag in my company name. And it’s legal size card stock, because I liked books that were 7″x8.5″. Have you ever tried to find legal size card stock? Good luck. And to find it in any kind of non-white color or pattern? It doesn’t exist. This stash I had special ordered from a paper supplier back in Georgia and had them cut it to legal size for me.
So I sat down and planned the card you see here, half a legal sheet (4.25″x14″), giving it two folds so that it not only had a fun reveal and plenty of space to write on, but would fit snugly into a standard 4 3/8″ x 5 3/4″ invitation envelope. I printed a batch of them on my home printer, hand-folded them, and wrote each of my clients a person note on the inside. I sent them all out just before New Year’s Eve. Since then, I’ve received nothing but smiles and reciprocated thank yous from the cards, proving that the whole enterprise was a success. The best part: I still have several sheets of the card stock left, and with a few tweaks of the art, I can whip up a non-holiday thank you note if I need one in a pinch.
I’m finally getting to a place where I can show you all what I’ve been working on during these past few weeks of silence. I’ve had a lot of projects in progress, and now many of them are finally coming to fruition. The first is a pair of posters for BackStage Theatre Company‘s 2011/2012 Season.
The first show in the company’s season is A Number, a fascinating and compelling story about a father who has cloned his son not once, but a number of times, trying to recapture something that he can’t quite put his finger on. The clones are now grown men, and the repercussions of the father’s actions are coming home. It was originated onstage with Michael Gambon as the father and Daniel Craig as all of the sons.
The concept for this image was a pile of photos of the same child with corrections and comments written on each for changes to the next attempt. The effect is cold and off-putting, and a bit horrifying at the detachment of the person who could do this, while also highlighting the difficulty of knowing what makes a person really that person. Serendipitously for me, I found a good stock photographer who had been using his own son for a lot of his work over the years and had no problem getting a collection of pictures of the same kid.
A Scent of Flowers is the second show of the BackStage season, and it is a very different play. This one is more Theatre of the Asburd and is about a woman who has died, but she lingers around exploring the relationships she had with the living. It’s quite surreal in places, such as in her conversations with the gravediggers and funeral director, and you are never really sure if parts are real or imagined. It reminds me of certain David Lynch movies.
My inspiration for this came from the works of the great surrealist Rene Magritte. His paintings in which he obscures the faces of his figures are very haunting and other-worldly. Once again, I was lucky enough to find just the right image for this project: a naked model with her eyes closed, which for this piece adds a layer of uncertainty: Is she dead? Is she asleep? Is she just smelling the flower?
I hope with each of these pieces to have intrigued the viewer enough to want to learn more. Isn’t that the ultimate purpose of a poster?
Over the weekend, I put together this little image for Lively Productions, which is producing a 10-minute musical comedy short in Samuel French’s short play festival out in New York. Samuel French is one of the largest publishers of plays, so it’s kind of a big deal. The show is called Taking The Plunge, and the synopsis I was given is that it is “a dark comedy about a man who flees his wedding to jump off Big Ben, where he finds his fiance’s mother also looking to take a leap.” I’ve read several short plays by the playwright Greg Edwards in the past (my girlfriend founded Lively Productions when she lived in New York, and she produced one of Edwards’ plays in Chicago and used him as a playwright for another of her projects). His stuff is really funny.
A theatre’s season announcement brochure is ideally the culmination of a season design project, the item which really shows off the visual direction the company’s marketing will be using over the next 9-12 months. In the case of this project, I am also designing a subscriber brochure, which is a brochure enclosed with season subscription tickets detailing important dates and procedures along with other helpful information. I’m designing that in this same style, but since it’s not going to print for another month, I’m leaving it out of this particular blog post.
In a departure from what the company had done previously in its 15-year history, the marketing director and I decided to create a 5.5″ x 8″ 12-page booklet for this season announcement rather than a fold-out brochure. We had planned on printing it on a quality uncoated paper stock, but I was not in charge of ordering the finished product and it was instead printed on matte stock by accident. That’s not a major crime, but having a nice texture to go along with this kind of style would have been nice.
This is the final poster I created for the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company 2011/2012 Season, and in many ways the easiest of all three. (Note, I’ve included the black border around the image as a reference for the image size, but it will not appear in the final artwork.)
Chesapeake is a lovely one-man play that practically hands you a buffet of metaphor and imagery to pull from. Briefly, it is the story of a performance artist who is maligned in the press by a conservative senator, who is attacking the artist and his work in order to look good in his re-election campaign. The senator’s plans are to abolish all public funding for the arts. To get even, the artist kidnaps the senator’s favorite dog, a Chesapeake Bay Retreiver, intending to train it to be his own dog, but he ends up getting into an accident (involving water) and dying. When he wakes up, he IS the dog, and goes about trying to manipulate the senator into NOT defunding the arts. The story is full of reincarnation, religious imagery, ethical considerations, politics, art, and even real heart. As I said, it’s a great play.
