In early 2015, Northern Nights Music Festival reached out about designing the poster for their upcoming summer event at Cook’s Valley Campground on the Mendocino/Humboldt County line. Their ask was clear: the location itself should feel like a headliner. Set deep in the Northern California redwoods, the festival had a spirit that needed to come through visually before a single artist name was read.

With Humboldt as the backdrop, my mind went straight to the psychedelic screenprint tradition of the Summer of Love era: rich, saturated color with an earthy undercurrent, hyperreal but grounded. The palette needed warmth without losing the cool, hazy mystery of nighttime in the redwoods.

The image I kept coming back to was the feeling of wandering through the woods and catching the glow of something happening just beyond the tree line. A stage, a crowd, light blooming up through the canopy. Something beckoning you toward it. That tension between the stillness of the forest and the heat of the festival in the distance is what drives the composition. The redwoods frame the scene like a natural proscenium, and the color does the work of pulling you in.

The festival’s lineup that year included Black Star (Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli), Rüfüs Du Sol, The Polish Ambassador, Gold Panda, and Shlohmo, among many others, spanning hip-hop, electronic, and live music across three days in July.