Furniture-ish!

I would post more photos of the work I completed in Nashville, but I want to get some really nice shots of them, and I am just not that good with the camera, or my camera just isn't that good.

But last week, as former Hatch intern Harry began his cross country adventure back home, he stopped by Louisville for a few fun days (minus the 2 days I spent on the couch with a stomach virus) and he gave me a few pics he took of some of my prints.

This job was for the California College of Art's Furniture design program. The senior show was called Furniture-ish, and the copy for the show stated that the students had been able to see Jim (Hatch Show Print manager) give a lecture and loved the way the posters looked so much, that they wanted one for their senior show. Very cool. At the time I did the poster I was not even 1 year out of college yet, so the feeling of putting up your senior show, and graduating was still pretty fresh in my mind. I knew how special this was for them, and I wanted to do something pretty special for their poster. (which I guess is true for all posters, but y'know...)

This was a challenge. It may have even been more challenging that all the posters I did with the tiny lists of sponsors. The reason that this was more difficult was because there are only so many of a certain letter in each size. So when I began, I not only had to find out what size would be best to fit all the information on the poster while maintaining my hierarchy of information, I also had to do it without running out of a the letters I needed in a certain size.
So I would build a couple of words, then realize I was out of N's.

Another problem I ran into often was that the names were too long to fit into one line. The two most challenging were the "Dorothy Bell" and "Smoke and Mirrors" line.

This was a little frustrating at first because I had to rebuild the first few lines of names a few times before I found a way of doing it that gave it the traditional Hatch look, but also didn't make it look like it was thrown together without any consideration to the desires of the client.

I maintained the letter height, but made the thicknesses of the letters vary. This gives it a cool funky look, that is only a slightly exaggerated version of something seen on tons of Hatch posters. Some of the people's first and last names have this look, but for the most part I thought I could maintain the birth names, but make the nicknames funky and fun.

Another creative way of fitting information into the poster was by using smaller font sizes, but stacking it. This helped solve the space problems I was having with "Smoke and Mirrors" and "With Special Guest". This was the first time I had done something like that in a poster and it worked really well. I think that it offsets the poster enough so that it wasn't 100% centered.

I sent the poster off and then a few days later I got this via fax.Yeah I framed it. I feel like this is what it's all about. Not necessarily having people stroke my ego, but knowing that I did a good poster and that the person who ordered it is truly happy with it.

The history of each poster from start to finish is pretty unique. In the case of most of them, you send them out and never see them again, sometimes you see them on a bulletin board, sometimes you see them hanging in a record store. In the case of the Furniture-ish job, I found this on the internet a few weeks later.I've been appropriated!! Someone designed a similar poster for the same show with similar colors, and even the funky letter thing has been reproduced. Interesting! Also they were giving away my design to people who came to see the show!