Poster: Heaven and Hell Ball (2004)

This is the first of two posters that I designed for the once-loved, once-extant Seattle arts facility, Consolidated Works. This is a perfect example of 99% of the poster jobs that I've done: a gigantic amount of mandatory text that I somehow have to incorporate into a pleasing design. I used to think fondly of being able to design the kind of posters that Jeff Kleinsmith or Dusty from Heads of State or Jason from The Small Stakes are able to design (i.e., posters that aren't really advertisements, but more commodities for the bands to sell - thus, they generally have minimal amounts of type.) But alas, they are much better artists than I am, so I must feed off the scraps.

In any case, I think this poster turned out rather well. With that amount of type, it kind of begs to be a simple, minimal poster, in order to be able to discern any hierarchy of information from the type. Typography was all in various weights of Univers. The bottle and hand were scanned from a Dover book on hands - I think it's called Hands, even. The ocean was part of some smallish engraving/illo that I found in some old Print magazine from the late 1940s. There was a ship in the middle of the ocean that I erased and replaced with the milk drop image, which was sourced from the internet, rez'd up, contrasted out, and placed. This poster was declared "The Poster of the Week" in The Stranger, some time in early 2005.

18" x 24", 3 colors, screenprinted by Heather Freeman and Brian Taylor at Patent Pending Press.