This is a recent design / illustration I created for the Mad Swirl - a Dallas based poetry collective that's been going strong for over a decade. My direction was to create a contemporary design while invoking the feel of the Beat poetry era. 

The project was to be printed with a single color and T-shirts were top priority, so it became a exploration of high contrast and buiding the scene in order to define the primary subject.

This close-up of the hitch hiker is a good exampel of how focusing on the details around the main subject, he is defined by the headlights of the passing car, and the highlights on the clothing. 

In order to weather my type, I laid out the typography very small on the computer, then enlarged it several times on a copy machine, and crumpled and uncrumpled the paper several times throughout the process to make it properly distressed. Once it was to my liking, I scanned it and brought it back into the layout.

Thanks for looking.