Typically, the designs for the open mic night events are based on some sort of microphone. After several months of having posters that seemed to feature variations of the same mic, by different designers, my clients made only one demand for this edition: no microphone. 

Initially, it was difficult to break away from the image of the microphone since it had been so well established. Fortunately Valentine's day happened to be just around the corner, and many songs are based on infatuation anyways so I developed an image on the idea of love songs.

 

Many of the posters for Open Mic Night in the past have had a multitude of layers involved with the imagery as well, so to differentiate from the past, I developed a concept that was clean, and simple.

 

Like many of my poster designs for the Univeristy of Minnesota Duluth, I designed this poster so that if a student were to remove it from the school halls to hang it in their room, they could trim it in a way to maintain the integrity of the image, while removing the text.