Yet another stylistic shift

“I love the colors!” 

“Your textures are amazing!” 

“I love the colors!” and “Your textures are amazing!” would handily take the top two spots if I ever ranked every response I’ve gotten for my gig poster work. And while it’s great to be complimented on anything, it makes me wonder sometimes if my work gets over too easily on tone and texture.

So I decided to break from the usual toolkit. Quicker turnaround, hours rather than days or weeks. No pretty colors, no airbrush stippling or gradients. Just hard edges, contrast, line and text. And maybe I’d use those limitations to create motion and texture through cut and deconstruction.

Fate cooperated when The Messthetics rolled through Sacramento in late April 2019, bringing Craig Wedren and local noise practitioners Drug Apts to Harlow’s. All three acts have an adventurous enough spirit that I felt comfortable taking some artistic license with the show poster.

I’d been in similar territory before. About ten years back I spent several months making posters with no color at all, as a way to sharpen my focus on composition. This would push further, stripping out tone and photographic imagery entirely. Just contrast and shape.

I allowed myself one concession: the final print would land on metallic silver cardstock. Minimalism can read as merely plain without a few bold moves to suggest the notes you aren’t playing. Rich black on speckled silver gave the piece a satisfying brutalist weight and felt in line with the vibe of everyone on the bill.

The deconstructed Messthetics band name was the hub of the whole thing. Using Illustrator’s Pathfinder I cut, fused and rearranged the type until it churned and roiled and twisted back on itself, a static object that reads as being in motion, like an optical illusion. What started as a purely text-based concept grew during the making of it, as the best ideas usually do. I added a grid of irregularly spaced horizontal stripes, deliberately imperfect to keep things from reading too digital, anchored by a line-rendered circle and a shadowy human figure. The figure’s reaching shadow stretching up out of frame turned out to be the right move. It’s the element people zeroed in on most, and it gave the piece the bit of mystery that invites people to come up with their own readings.

Show information gets gridded across the top in a quasi-Swiss information architecture style, a small sober patch to counterbalance everything churning below it.

The bands loved them. Being told that a poster captures the feel of someone’s music is about as good as it gets.