In early March I was approached by the Ambler Choral Society about creating a poster and pamphlet section to advertise their upcoming concert in April. They were singing classic Americana poets and folk music and wanted the poster to reflect that inspiration.
They didn't have anything specific it needed to have, nor did they have any ideas of subject matter. After some conversation we finally came to the conclusion to include the great American outdoors. They also mentioned that one of their members had photography of the Rockies that I was welcome to use. I took him up on this offer and used it.
(more about my process below)
My initial inspiration for the font was Jack Daniels Whiskey. This is a font called Bourbon. I wanted to place this on a parchment-like background with a brown/goldish color to emulate old-timey posters.
The base area that houses all the content is blurred, to emulate a translucent window, something you might find in a poorly crafted door out west in the 1800's.
Other than those 2 specific influences, I wanted to keep as much of the mountains and greenery in the poster as possible, leading to a use of drop shadows, blurring, and image modification to keep the contrast high enough to be legible, but unobtrusive enough to be aesthetically pleasing.
After the spring event, I was approached again to create another poster and pamphlet for ACS. This time around, they were looking for something to match holiday music that they would be singing in December.
Like the holiday it represents, this poster is made with the classical image of holiday warmth. Overall the idea was to convey this holiday warmth by using classic design elements.
I wanted to use a vignette over top of a soft snowy landscape. I achieved this background by taking a landscape photograph and applying a slight blur to it, and overlaying various effects to appear clear, but softened and warm.
The type on the poster is all center-aligned to emulate a formal invitation from an event. The font I used for the title is called "Trajan Pro", a popular choice for classical designs. The top script font is called "Zaner Pro" which I chose to, again, emulate a formal, hand written invitation.
I was again approached in 2020 to design a poster for the Spring concert, however the concert was cancelled due to the rise of COVID-19 in March. They have since resumed performing and requested another design for Spring 2022.
"How Can We Keep From Singing" is a return to performing after a 2 year hiatus. Much like the 2019 concert, it focused on "Americana" as the main theme and more specifically, rivers.
The main request was something bolder, yet simple. They wanted to make no mistake that ACS is back people should come and see the performance.
My new logo design for them takes center stage and is something I hope becomes easier to identify with these concerts as time goes on, making it easier for ACS to be easily recognized in promotional material going forward.
Most of my design was to keep legibility high and bluntly display the theme as the background. However, my choice of Zeitung Pro (sans serif) and Rockwell (serif) were subtle intentions of implicating classic Americana text; Zeitung referencing popular fonts of the Roaring 20's, and Rockwell attempting to mimic newspaper headlines and posters of the late 1800's. The song list and informational text are in Futura as it is one of my favorite texts for legibility while retaining modern style.
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