{The Detholz! & Poster Design}
{Chicago band The Detholz! are coming to Birdy’s on July 17 ••••••• Another must see is God Made Robots.}
Gig Posters are often a designers best creative outlet, because of two things:
1. Great Music
2. Less restrains on the normal content guidelines of a project/client
You can get more abstract if you want to (depending on the band) or follow a certain theme that will not only compliment the band/music style but attract the eye to your poster.
I couldn’t tell you the exact formula for creating the perfect poster, I’ll be honest, I’ve never created a poster that I was so in love with that I felt it was perfect. I’m kind of a pessimist in that way-there’s always something wrong that I want to fix or “do better.”
I believe creating a great poster design has a lot to do with finding an object, theme, story to pull from and building around it. The artwork should stand out bold but still allow the reader to figure out the name of the band and venue. There may be other info you need to include like ticket prices and sponsor/promoter logos, but if your design can incorporate the important information without distracting from the focus of the poster, you’ve figured it out.
A grid is always helpful too. If you get anxious thinking about a grid, just think of it as a blueprint that helps you figure out where info or art can go, and you can change it at anytime. You will also need to figure out if you want the flow of the design to be vertical or horizontal, broken in thirds, or simply scattered into a pattern-like distribution.
{Another version of The Detholz! poster that is a little weaker in organization-I plan on turning it into a wallpaper with more black space.}
There is a weight and clarity to poster art. If you shove too much information onto it without sketching or figuring out a grid or some way to organize the text with the art-the poster will appear cluttered and the excitement or mystery it could of brought is lost.
Unless it’s a festival with several acts and events going on at the same time, putting everything including a google map into a poster design will be terribly hard to balance. You can be selective about how much info needs to be included. Anything that will overcrowd the poster or appear as overwhelming with info, can usually be fixed by directing people to a web site for more info or suggest a program/take away piece the day of the event with more info on it.
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