Week 6 | Palermo

Design Strategy and Client Information:
The demographic for the Crossroads Guitar Festival is guitarists and music enthusiasts, especially those interested in classic rock and blues. Many of the musicians performing fall into these genres such as Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Jeff Beck and the Allman Brothers. I felt that most concert posters have a picture of a guitar on the poster and it was getting cliché. I wanted my poster to differ from this trend but I knew I had to incorporate a guitar. I chose to take a picture of the fret board of my guitar. I thought the fret board was a great idea because guitarists and music enthusiest would recognize the fret dots (the double dots are on the 12th fret) and it would get those viewing the poster to envision the whole guitar. The frets also created a way to clearly separate the information on the poster. I looked at past posters for the event and they featured colorful and intricate hand drawn pictures of guitars, so I think my design is realistically affordable.

Choice of Typefaces:
I went with the Mojo typeface for the header and the word “blues” as a way of alluding to the 1960s and early 1970s where Clapton and some of the other performing musicians got their start. I noticed in Eric Claptons’ most recent cd releases that many of the featured fonts and texts on the covers had a psychedelic feel to them. I wanted to have a psychedelic feel to the poster since many of the concert goers probably grew up in that era of music. I used Futura as the other typeface because I wanted a sans serif to make the poster look modern, to contrast with the nostalgic Mojo. I also chose Future because it was very easy to read at first glance, the viewer doesn’t have to stare at the poster for minutes trying to decipher the typeface. I colored the header with a gradient of three bright colors to enhance the psychedelic feel. I colored the word “blues” blue to make it stand out more.

Visuals:
The main visual is the fret board. I knew it needed to take up the whole poster and bleed of the side to be fully effective. To create it, I loosened the strings on my guitar, pulled them out of the way and took a picture of the fret board around the 12th fret (the two dots would be most recognizable). Then I cropped the photo in Photoshop, and used a watercolor effect to make it look as if it was painted. I thought the watercolor helped the visual appear more nostalgic and be more in tune with the 1960s era of psychedelic art. In the poster the frets ended up serving as dividers for the posters information, separating the header, from the caption, from the list of performers.