Funeral for a Friend poster - The Brickyard

I was fortunate enough to be offered the chance to design another poster this week. which just happens to be quite a big band by the name of Funeral for a Friend. I was only given this opportunity because my friend James couldn't complete the poster due to going on a kick-ass holiday to Florida to purchase a shite tonne of records and get sunburnt.

The poster was quite fun to work on despite having such a short amount of time allotted for it, so instead of follow the route of researching previous designers and looking at how they made their works, I went straight into it by looking at what the band had previously had designed.

I got into a strange confusion with another band by the same name but it proved not to be a big deal of identifying between the two, seeing as one is Welsh and the other is Canadian I think.

On looking for inspiration I went to the bands website and looked at their promo imagery, colour sets and styling. I used the green because of an idea that Mark (from The Brickyard) to help relate to their Welsh background, although the colours doesn't make me instantly think of Wales, I still think it's a good fit.

I went with the old trusty Helvetica Bold and Roman, and a simple three colours scheme and a the idea of a shift or blur of the imagery.

I feel like it could be possible for the poster to have more of an edge to it, but I feel it does the job that is needed and clearly outlines the information attendants may need, and the image shift isn't too distracting so you can still recognise the band members. 

Oh, I do like the lovely people at The Brickyard

If you are unaware of The Brickyard I'll give you a little information; it's a bloody brilliant gig venue, running good gigs with good bands and uses local designers to help with the posters and such like.
Luckily for me, they decided to contact me only a few weeks back and first asked me to design a poster for a Hard Rock and Metal night. And I assume that went well because here I am making another blog post about another poster I have designed for them.

This time I got very very excited when I was given the offer to design for the Motown and Soul Night that they run, becuase they are ma' jams brother! (and it's also a rather fun night). I started with the poster searching for old Black and White images to use for the poster without great success until I spoke to my buddy James who told me about a lovely feature on the Google image search to get royalty free images, but that's my little secret now.

This lead me to find a brilliant image of a past hero of Motown, Levi Stubbs. I added colour filters to the image to start my testing and slowly built up things like textures and Typography, I won't go through all the testing but it was a short circle of testing upon the principle idea, until Mark (my contact at The Brickyard) was happy, which is what I should really always aim for.

If you'd like to go, here's the link to the event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/492346840865207/518659468233944

I'm rather fond of this, I feel it captures the idea of Motown and Soul rather well.

A quick knock up piece

I had an idea yesterday which I'm hoping to follow up; this ideas was to look at the characteristics of fonts and most principally Times New Roman. There isn't all that much I can say about this but it's very much inspired by Abram Games and using my favourite texture of crumpled paper.

I made the colour scheme almost monochrome as that's the colour set of tradition printing and papers, but I added the gold as I felt it really added to the character of the figure.
If you can't tell I'm making the idea of Times being "The True English Gent", but to it's history and style.

I hope you like it.

My first real gig poster design!

 On Saturday the 31st of May I was approached by Mark from The Brickyard about starting to do poster designs for them, which the most recent one which I was asked to do was a poster for "A Night of Cumbrian Hard Rock and Metal" which is on the 2nd of August this year.

Saying that I don't have much expertise in the genre of metal and I was requested not to make it a typical 'distressed' or 'grungy' style poster, I feel that I made an effective eye catching poster with small hints to distress and metal.

I looked at posters for Download Festival and Enter Shikari for inspiration and drew on a few ideas I had already locked in my head of record sleeve designs, such as AC/DC, Anthrax and quite principally the famous shirt collection of my friend Louis (a really metal head with an awesome hair cut to match).

Da poster!

My cheeky mug on the Grillust blog

As you may have read I entered a poster competition for the lecture with Magnus and Fredrik A.K.A Snask, and from entering I went on to win the competition which entitled me to an overly cheesey photo shoot with the two main men themselves.

Not an amazing post or even a fantastic image but I'm pretty happy to be on the Grillust blog with a nice witty comment on my smile.

http://grillust.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/snask-swedens-finest-come-back-to-their.html
Have a read!

The pride in their faces.

Look, there's me. Oh and Freddie looking somewhere else.