Thursday, May 1, 2008

Poster: Clarion West (2008)


This is the 5th year in a row that the Clarion West Writer's Workshop has asked me to design a poster for their advertising. It's a yearly project that I look forward to and I happily donate my design time, because they are really great at giving me a lot of creative freedom (and pay for the printing of a cool screenprint too!)


It's also a big challenge because the poster is used for advertising and there's a lot of information to get across. John Berry has been their art director for the past couple years and is an excellent typographer, so I get a bunch of type mentoring too, which is always nice.


This poster is the second idea that I came up with. The initial idea I actually created a rough comp for, but I decided that that design would probably work better (with evolution) as a book cover, rather than a poster, so I'm saving it for later.


The design that I ended up creating I really like a lot. I created it at night during a business trip to Denver, and I had no access to a scanner, so all of the imagery that is collaged into the poster I already had on my harddrive -- the elements I've either used before in other compositions or they were images that I had scanned in for other projects but never ended up using.


I like that it doesn't overtly scream "science fiction and fantasy". Well, maybe the skeleton dude does, but maybe not. I really enjoy the shape of the black arabic letterform bits and the overall colors. I'd like to have a small amount printed on a natural stock, which I think will work with those colors well. The colors remind me of 1950s gravure printing, which had such mellow, non-super-saturated colors.


18" x 24", 3-color screenprint.