Outdoor
HHDA & Live@5
In 2008 I was given the opportunity to do poster designs for the Historic Hattiesburg Downtown Association’s Live After Five and Art Walk events. Up until this point we had been using an established brand for HHDA setup some years ago by RARE design. But with this project, we needed to differentiate the Live After Five look from the existing HHDA look. This was my first attempt at creating a poster. I was incredibly excited about having a different kind of project that I naturally set off to do research on poster designs. I quickly discovered there were so many kinds of posters styles out there. In sorting through all of my research, I took my inspiration from the Hatch company. This print shop is famous for many of the looks of older carnival, concerts and other event type posters that are easily recognizable in style. The stacked type and creative use of illustrations appealed to me. I knew I could pull from this for the poster directions. This style was used through several projects of the year and even for later Live After Five Projects.
Live After 5 April '08 Poster
Live After Five April '08 Outdoor Board
October Art Walk '08 Outdoor
October Art Walk '08 Poster
Holiday Open House '08 Poster
December Art Walk '08 Poster
Live@5 Poster
Walk-In Spinal Clinic
I have noticed a trend in advertising for most back or spine centers where apparently to illustrate that such-n-such facility actually helps your back problems requires a naked body proving to you that the medical team there knows where the back is. So, I decided to explore an alternative strategy
That has to smart
The birds in this city seem to have issues
Yeah, they went with naked backs.
The September Art Walk Poster ’09
When it comes to the Historic Hattiesburg Downtown Association, we are really lucky in the sense that they often let us run free on designs. I am planning on posting other projects we have been able to work on. When I found out that it was time for the September (or Fall) Art Walk, I wanted to try something completely different from last year for two reasons. 1) It is always nice to explore other ways to branch out in a client’s established brand. 2) HHDA had been a co-sponsor of the Live After 5 Concert Series (later changed to Live @ 5) the year before. Live @ 5 had been a success and broke off into its on organization, taking with it a bridging style we used for both HHDA posters and Live After 5 posters. To simplify a complicated story, HHDA needed something new. Thus the process for developing the Fall Art Walk Poster began. Rodney, Ben and I were discussing the project by the plant wall one morning and decided that we should explore poster series centered around landmarks starting with the HHDA posters and see where that lead us. And here is the journey.
As with any new design you have to start somewhere. I knew I wanted to convey a downtown scene with people enjoying the Art Walk.
The initial Fall Art Walk Sketch
I wasn’t happy with the style of this direction and wanted to push it to a full on illustration. While I liked some elements of this sketch, in the end we felt it was way too detailed. Not to mention that this style would have to be maintained across other posters if we went this route and we didn’t have that kind of time on these projects.
It all goes back to the K.I.S.S. method we learned in school. Keep It Simple Stupid. Finally we had a starting place.
I brought in elements from the other sketches and worked in the Seaenger as a landmark element.
We pushed the design a little further and arrived here for one of our deadlines and also made this design into an outdoor board for around town.
After a little more pushing, we ended up with this final design for the poster.
Fall Art Walk Final Sketch