The Roots Poster Sacramento 2006

Concept and Process

Where small or even micro budgets can present challenges, sometimes those challenges push creativity. You can find interesting—if unorthodox—ways to present the design when you have to find alternate ways to do it. 

For The Roots‘ 2006 show at Empire in Sacramento, I wanted to do something a bit layered and oblique. Something that elevated the band in the same way the band elevates their sound. Only problem: we had no budget to speak of. Screenprints were right out from jump, and having come off a run of dozens of full color offsets for show posters, I wanted to try to take this one somewhere new. 

Since a Roots show on its own was a guaranteed sellout, I had the freedom to try things from another angle. To wit: this is actually a two layer poster. The first layer is simply straight show and venue information printed in rich-black on semi-translucent vellum that I hinged along  the top with an adhesive.

When you initially saw the poster, you’d get a sense of this layered effect. Lifting the vellum pulls away the show info and reveals the “art” part of the poster, which is a colorful watercolor collage of musical, spiritual, and titular elements. 

These were extremely popular before and at the show and the band themselves requested a stack to take with them. As I recall Questlove in particular really dug these.