The Gig Poster
By Westley Mata
Is it possible to visualize how something sounds?
The answer is yes, and for the Gig Poster project, I had to do just that.
My objective was to relay the feeling of listening to a genre, artist, album, or song to those that have also listened to the type of music. Another requirement of a gig poster is to relay the message of a band performance happening at a time and place. To make art really feel the way a song sounded, I had to keep an ear out to both the lyrics of every song, but also to my emotions while the song was playing. The music I chose was from two different bands, The Maine and Against the Current, which invoke similar mellow feelings from my artistic soul. A difficulty that comes from this process is catching music from the air and containing in a 2-Dimensional piece of artwork while keeping in mind the many elements of a great design. I felt the ideal subject to capture the feeling of these bands would be something fragile, so I decided upon a butterfly drinking the color out of a rose.
Sketching
This process starts with a lot of sketching. In total I sketched about 40 thumbnails to refine my idea and find the best to meet my objectives. These are some of the initial sketches that I came up with as I let the music reverberate through me.
After completing about 10 sketches (on the page above) while listening to music, I decided to write down all the words I could come up with that fit my vision of how the poster would feel. I wrote a few words and phrases to anchor what words came to mind, then highlighted a few of them to put together into one cohesive piece. I chose to leave some out later on, but this is where it all started.
This exercise brought my focus together, and about 20 thumbnails later I came up with the page below. Butterflies are delicate and easy to break, so I felt it would be a great subject to design in Adobe Illustrator. This is where I was messing around with making the butterfly bleed from cracking or being pierced by pins or nails. After this I decided on sketch no. 4 and 9. I wanted the butterfly to suck the color out of the flower, symbolically giving this fragile insect the ability to take life to survive.
Drafts
These are a few of the initial drafts from my process. I decided on naming my imaginary band, "Infallible." I felt the meaning of the word contrasts the delicate nature of the butterfly and rose. I changed the third draft background quite drastically because it just felt too simple before. This improved the image quite a bit and contrasted against the simplicity of my design.
I picked an imaginary venue as well. "Wonderland" is a reference to one of Against the Current's song names that heavily inspired this piece. I also picked the concert date to be on November 31st, a non existent date to go along with the light fantasy setting the image gives.
After finalizing some of the color and textures, I wanted to make the font work better for the composition. I re-positioned the butterfly and rose and the wording and changed the font to be something that looked less busy. I used elements of proximity to keep the objects grouped together and comfortably spaced from the edges of my poster. After two weeks of working on this project, I finally came out with my final gig poster.
I used principles of proximity to contain the sections of the image, and practiced repetition through my use of colors and textures and shapes throughout the piece. The words and blue rose and butterfly contrast hard against the dark purple background to make them pop hard. I also aligned the text with itself and with the left side of the rose, so I followed quite a few design principles to produce this piece. The background texture sums up the static sound many of The Maine's songs include in the back of the instrumental sections.
Conclusion
The experience I gained through the creative process during this poster was invaluable. By the end of it I hopefully was able to capture the emotions The Maine and Against the Current fill me with when I jam out to their songs. Thank you for reading about my journey in this project.
I'll talk to you later in my next designer update.
-West
