A journey through Niklaus Troxler’s jazz posters universe — 56 posters motion tribute over almost 2 minutes.

From Niklaus Troxler Poster Collection book (Lars Müller Publishers):

“Few contemporary designers devote themselves to the poster medium with such perseverance as Niklaus Troxler. His extensive oeuvre includes the design of CD, album, and book covers, logos, interior and exterior graphics, as well as free illustrative and artistic works. However, the poster-and especially the jazz poster-is his passion. Troxler organized the first jazz concert in Willisau in 1966, and in 1975 he founded a festival there that has since brought established and lesser-known names in Swiss and international jazz to the stage on an annual basis. He directed the event and was responsible for the design of the concert and festival posters until 2009, at which time he handed both over to a younger generation.”

The whole process took around 175 hours.

The first stage includes the research — looking for posters inside the books, photographing and sorting them.

After that I place all the selects inside Adobe Illustrator and begin looking for any common ground between various posters. This helps to come up with ideas for transitions way before opening After Effects for the first time, basically it's a full designed storyboard. 

The common ground can be visual elements themselves (shapes, juxtaposition and colors), or a logical idea, for example the light bulb coming in after the yellow hand connects the plug into the socket.

The third and the least fun step is tracing and font digging. Unlucky for me, Niklaus is using a vast amount of fonts besides the classic Akzidenz and Univers that were popular and available before the digital age. 

99% of the tracing in illustrator was manual and very time consuming. Since I am creating the design assets for myself and I plan exactly how everything's going to move, it's crucial to make sure the amount of anchor points stays low and their placement is correct.

The final and the most exciting step is always the animation in After effects.

This time I decided to step out of my "type and geometric shapes" comfort zone and made sure to challenge myself with a bunch of hands and music instruments animations. That was very fun to work on and I was really happy with the result!

Enjoy the following process and selected shots:

Research.

I wasn't satisfied with the amount of Niklaus' work I found online, went digging for a few books and discovered more interesting posters.

Selected loops

"Gradient control" technique used for the dots animation in the background.

The black and white gradients animation on the right are controlling the size of the dots with the help of expressions.

White = 100% scale

Black = 0% scale

Cyclops shots

Side by side compared to the original posters

Pencil animation bent over an animated path with Bao Boa plugin in After Effects

Outline view mode in Adobe Illustrator

Original design — Niklaus Troxler

Animation — Dase Boogie

Music and sound design — Soul Supreme

Thanks for watching!