Band posters are one of my favourite things to design. Unlike corporate design which must adhere to brand standards and marketing objectives, band posters are free, they are organic, and they allow for more creativity.

We’ve all seen the final version of cool band posters hanging in our favourite pub or bar but very few people outside of the design community have had the opportunity to see the whole process and layers of a band poster. Below are the steps I took to design my latest poster for The Nix Dicksons and Frankie McQueen show on June 19, 2010.

For this poster my creative direction was as follows: tropical theme, feature Zharu the Volcano God, the three bands, sponsors logos, and brief “when” and “where” info.

Step 1

With all of my projects I start with a blank sheet of paper. This is definitely the most intimidating and exciting part of designing anything. I slowly collect my thoughts and envision what I would like to create.

Step 2

Once I have a defined image in my mind I start from the bottom layer and work my way up. For this particular poster I needed to use tropical elements to stay on theme. I found an excellent royalty free image on www.sxc.hu, of a bamboo curtain, it looked like a good starting place so I got to work. You’ll notice that the image has a weird splotchy texture to it, that’s no accident. I applied a filter known as Artistic Cutout, it turns a full colour image into an image with a specified amount of colours, for this piece I used 8.  The Artistic Cutout filter eliminates most of the depth in the image, which is great because as a background image i didn’t want it to be to overpowering.

Step 3

The texture used in step two was great for creating an attractive background but it won’t work so well for displaying content. Therefore, in the next step my goal was to create a defined content area. I took a grungy piece of paper and applied the same Photoshop filter Artistic Cutout. The filter once again reduced the complexity of the image and matched up nicely with the background.

Step 4

Step 4 is very subtle but extremely important to the overall look of the poster. What I’ve done is set my foreground colour to orange then apply what is called a “blending mode” to the solid colour. The blending mode I used is called Overlay. Overlay multiplies or screens the colors, depending on the base color. Basically the entire image ends up with the same, consistent colour tones.

Step 5

This was a crucial point in the poster design because to be completely honest I was stuck! I had tried incorporating the typography over the grungy paper texture and it looked awful. Then a spark of inspiration, “why not use a word bubble… gunge style”! And that is exactly what I did, if you can notice there are actually three different layers to the word bubble. The background layers are once again set to Overlay to give that cool colour blend and since no content would be directly over those two layers I could get away with it. The dark brown bubble, however, had to be solid so that the typography would be legible and easy to read, so there was no Overlay fun there.

Step 6

Step 6 was really fun for me because I got to incorporate Zharu The Volcano God! I’d like to take credit for the cool tiki illustration but my heart of hearts will not allow it. As in most cases when you see a really cool illustration, it was purchased from a third party stock photography website (in this case www.fotolia.com).

This step may seem out of order with step 5. Why did I decided to create a word bubble content area before I found the image of Zharu… good question. A lot of times with my design I have a vision for what I want, and I just adapt to what the creative universe provides, this time it worked but other times it has failed miserably.

Step 7

Next we tackle the typography. As you can see in this step the poster is really starting to come to life. I had played around with all types of fonts, thin ones, thick ones, tiki fonts, and Hawaiian font but nothing was working. Then I tried a seldom used font in my arsenal, it is a font called Capture It. It reminded me of the fonts you would see spray-painted on the side of wooden cargo boxes, kinda grungy but still extremely legible. Although it wasn’t exactly on theme it just seemed to fit for some reason, plus it is bold enough to be seen by your grandma without her bi-focals at 20 yards.

One piece of advice I would like to give about typography for band posters is this, nothing else is as important as prominently featuring the band names! Having a cool poster is great but it no one can read the band names then your entire poster design has just gone down the drain.

Step 8

We are getting really close now. In this step we add the supporting content and the sponsors logos. My thinking in designing band posters is this, a person will see the bands who are playing, if they are interested they will take an extra step forward to see when and where the show is. Therefore, i usually make this info smaller then the band names.

Once the supporting content is in place I add the sponsors logos. I hate adding sponsor logos to posters, the colours are always off, they usually sit awkwardly at the bottom of the page or are hidden away in a lonely corner. However, the sponsors are usually the ones who pay me… did I mention I love sponsor logos!

Step 9

Well this is the last step, adding the final touches. A great artist once said, a painting isn’t finished until you cannot add or subtract anything from it. It’s amazing how true that statement is because although I thought I had completed this piece something just seemed to be missing. I an online search for some really cool palm trees and these are what I came up with. I Overlaid a fee trees behind Zharu, and on the background to create another dimension to the poster. And last but not least I included a few palm trees on Frankie McQueen’s name as a final touch. Voila!

So that is how I created the infamous Nix Dickson and Frankie McQueen poster. I really hope I didn’t mislead anyone into thinking this was a tutorial as it most certainly was not. Anyway thanks for reading my blog, and check back with me soon.

For more excellent tips on band posters, and band promotion visit www.band-brand.com.