Rock Poster Design: From Concept Development to Execution | DKNG Studios | Skillshare
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Rock Poster Design: From Concept Development to Execution

teacher avatar DKNG Studios, Design + Illustration

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Trailer

      1:52

    • 2.

      Welcome Lecture

      45:56

    • 3.

      Initial Design and Illustration

      17:07

    • 4.

      Optional: Previously Recorded Feedback and Q+A

      45:43

    • 5.

      Refining Your Design

      18:11

    • 6.

      Client Stories

      6:15

    • 7.

      More Creative Classes on Skillshare

      0:33

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About This Class

Ever fallen in love with a concert poster for a band you didn't even know? We'll teach you how to create a poster that will inspire fans and captivate fans-to-be.

This class will take you through the entire process of designing a poster for a concert, movie, or other event. This class is perfect for aspiring designers looking to add a poster design to their portfolio or expand their knowledge of translating ideas from mind to paper to computer. This class will also be a good opportunity to receive feedback throughout the design process.

What You'll Learn

  • Concept Development. You'll brainstorm concepts and create sketches for 2-3 designs.
  • Initial Design and Illustration. You'll create your design with a final product in mind, such as a screen print, digital graphic, or album cover.
  • Final Design and Typography. We'll show you how to add finishing touches to your design and cover typographic elements.

What You'll Make

You'll start by selecting a subject for you poster design (can be a real event or let your imagination run wild). We'll then take you through our process of brainstorming and solidifying 2-3 solid ideas that will make it to the sketch phase. Based on sketches, you'll select a final concept and design for your poster and get work. Based on your chosen style, you'll have the option to jump right into the computer or begin illustrating on paper. You'll share your final design (or design in progress) to receive feedback from your peers.

We'll also be sharing design resources and provide examples from our own portfolio as well as cover how client feedback can make or break your project and how to keep your design on track.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

DKNG Studios

Design + Illustration

Top Teacher

DKNG is a full service graphic design studio with a focus on the entertainment industry. We work directly with bands, venues, promoters and a range of independent and corporate clients.

Dan Kuhlken and Nathan Goldman were both drawn to music and design at an early age, but didnt combine their talents until 2005 when the duo founded a design studio with the goal of fusing these two creative avenues. The pair has found a niche in linking a personal and unique aesthetic to the worlds most talented musical artists.

With dynamically different skill sets ranging from fine art to film production, Dan and Nathan bring diverse talents and artistic perspectives to every project. DKNG strives to provide their clients with the image and recognition that they deserve. Their past client... See full profile

Related Skills

Design Graphic Design

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Transcripts

1. Trailer: DKNG stands for Dan Kuhlken and Nathan Goldman and we are full service graphic designer studio. We mainly focus on music industry clients who really have a whole range of projects that we work on. Class is called rock poster design. It's essentially teaching how to create an event poster. Students will be creating their own poster, which could be for a band, could be for their own band, but it could really be of any of event. We broke everything down into a couple sessions in this class and we go over typography, we go over layout design, color separations a little bit. More or less it's just about the whole process of creating and basically competing with obstacles that you run into creating a design and hopefully we can get people through that means they can create something good. The main thing would be just to have fun with it and design should be an enjoyable process even though you will be working within certain constraints dealing with a client. The main thing is just to have fun with it. 2. Welcome Lecture: I think we're live. On air. All right, welcome everyone to our first live office hours for our class rock poster design. We'll start off just by introducing ourselves. We are DKNG. I'm Nathan. I'm Dan. We're going to get started in about a minute here, just so people have a moment to join. But we also wanted to take a moment just to thank everyone for participating in the class. We were really overwhelmed and surprised by how many people wanted to participate. So, we're really excited to have such a big group. That were blown away by the roster. Over 800 people, it's really really exciting. It sounds like talking to the folks of Skillshare and having such a large class is going to be very helpful in terms of having a lot of people that can comment on each other's work, and it should be a very productive experience in terms of being able to get a lot of personalized feedback for the things you're posting in the class. So it looks like we have about 150 viewers right now. I can see the actual number rising. A lot of people have signed in. I think it's about time we can actually start. Okay. Can you see a chat window for people to ask questions? Actually, yeah. But no one's commented. There's someone out there want to take something really quick so we can make sure that we are getting comments, sort of just shouting out into the dark. Refreshing comments, no comments. We have 163 people that don't want talk to us. Well, I think we can say that as we're going along with the lecture today, feel free to post any questions or comments you have and we're reserving about 20 minutes at the end today to address any questions and anything we don't get to we'll try to address in the discussion area of the class page on the Skillshare website. Yeah. Yes. Let's go ahead and get started. From the looks of the student project section on the Skillshare site, it looks like a lot of people have already jumped in and chosen the band or the event that they're going to be designing a poster for. Just in case you haven't gotten started yet, we did want to briefly cover that selection process. A couple of resources that are online that you can check out if you're looking for a concert or an event near you that you're going to use with the one that's called pollstar.com, and Dan you are able to. I'm going to bring up my screen here. So are you able to see my desktop now? So, there's Pollstar. So that's kind of a resource where you can get news about what bands are going on tour, is about to start touring. Another one that you're probably familiar with is ticketmaster.com. So, yeah, this is just kind of a starting point. If you have no idea what you want to do, check out these sites. That being said, we're going to talk a lot about concert posters in this class and that's all we're going to be using from our portfolio as examples, but a lot of the principles from this class you can also apply to any type of event. So, if you want to make a poster for your school play, or a stand up comedian, or any number of events, you can kind of apply the same ideas. One other thing I wanted to mention in this kind of initial research phase is you should also start thinking about the purpose of your poster, and kind of a disclaimer from us is that most of the DKNG posters that you'll see that we do are primarily used as merchandise or memorabilia for the show. So, we have all the pertinent info information like the band name, the date, the location, the venue, but we typically don't include things like information on how to purchase tickets or the box office phone number or things like that, because the posters are being used to advertise the show. But that doesn't mean that your poster may not do that. So, you might want to start thinking at this phase what is going to be the purpose of your poster, and once we get into the sketching phase, we can talk about. Dan do you have any other thoughts on this kind of initial research stuff? Just to elaborate on making this poster for a select bands. Having recognition is definitely a hard thing to do and we get permission because the actual bands reach out to us. However, you are making this poster for let's say your favorite band, and let's say, you don't have permission to actually make the poster, it's okay to use in our portfolio. The only way you can get in trouble is if you start selling this on your own. So, this just kind of a licensing thing and I think a lot of people forget that that's an actual rule, and they can get in trouble that way. Yeah, and that was actually I saw that, someone posted in a discussion thread a question about, how do I contact the band to get permission. Yeah, keep in mind that for the purpose of this class, you can really do anything you want because we're assuming that you're just going to use this poster as part of a class project, and if you did try to sell it, that would certainly be illegal without the band's permission. So, I would say at this point, this is really more of a portfolio piece. It's a little bit of a shout in the dark if you want to try to contact a bigger name band to see if they want to use your poster. So at this point, I would kind of chalk it up to experience portfolio case, and once you start building your portfolio, start reaching out to local bands, and hopefully eventually, you can start getting in touch with some of your dream clients. So, I am now seeing comments flowing in. So, there's actual people watching us. This is very fun. Cool. All right. So I'm going to go back to my screen where I continue with the lecture. So now we can jump into the kind of research Part two section which once you've decided on who your subject is going to be for your poster, you can start to dig a little deeper and learn about them. So right here I'm on google, and this is a great starting point. So for example, I'm searching the Foo Fighters. You'll see they got their official website, they have their Wikipedia page, their my space, I don't think if anyone uses My Space anymore. But there's also imagery here. There is all the album covers. So, this is a playground of information, and this is kind of where we just dive in and learn as much as possible of the latest. Yeah so I guess at this point when we have a new client and we're kind of doing this research, a few other things we like to do is listen to their music. If this is all about a concert, you definitely want to get a feel for the band's sound and how you might be able to visually represent that. Wikipedia is a great resource just for getting an overview. Obviously this is a lot easier from huge bands like the Foo Fighters than a garage band in your neighborhood. But it's definitely a good starting point. We also try to find band interviews on the web because obviously Wikipedia is not necessarily 100 percent accurate all the time. So, if we can hear directly from the band, talk about how they got started, what their name means that's all helpful information. That's when you get something really specific to the general public might not know about the band. And it would be very applicable to finding a style for them that might be a little bit more subliminal. Yeah. Another thing we like to do is look at the band's album art, look at their web site, kind of look at how the band has represented themselves visually. And that's usually another good clue for you as to what kind of style or look might be good for this particular band just to see what they choose to do themselves. Beyond that we also look at what can we identify that's unique to this band. How can we design a poster that feels like it's specifically for this band and we couldn't just slap someone else's name on it and it would work equally well. And then a couple other notes on that research phase, we look at you know what ideas and imagery would really resonate with hardcore fans of this band. Would they see something on a poster and go, "Oh yeah that totally reminds me of these guys". And then Dan is showing us geekposters.com right now which is another great resource in terms of looking at what other people may have done for a particular band. So I'm just sticking with the theme and I'm searching the Foo Fighters and seeing what they've done. They're pretty eclectic in terms of what people's created, what people have created for them. All high energy stuff. Another way, another band that I'm now down here is The Decemberists, and you can see that their style is a little more subdued and earthy and calm. This is also a great source to see what has been done and what to avoid because it's been done so much. So you can kind of see that there's some reoccurring themes here, a lot of trees and a lot of birds. We've actually been reached, The Decemberists actually reached out to us a while back and funny enough they requested that we do not show any birds or trees in their poster. Yes well, in terms of this class you're not actually going to be dealing with a client. But it's good to keep in mind that when a band like this comes to you, it's quite possible that they're not just going to give you a blank slate, they're going to say, "Hey everyone's making a tree poster, we really need you to avoid that." Or they may want something specific and say, "Hey you know this new album that we're doing, it's all about birds and there's a bird on the cover and we would love to get your take on that." Keep in mind that this is designed, I think we mentioned in the lecture notes, it's art plus compromise that you are going to have a client giving their opinion as well. So keep that in mind for when you do work with a client on a project like this down the road. These pages, many of you may know this blog. This is OMG Posters and this is definitely a great source for finding out what the latest poster art that's coming out in the world. So, this blog is really just all about the latest and greatest and it's a great way to kind of find out what trending styles are happening and also helps you avoid repeating things that have already been done. There's our stuff. Anyways, go ahead and continue Nathan. Yeah and then one other inspirational site we could take a look at is called Design Inspiration. This is really just a fun site to check out, if you ever want your interest sparked a little debt and are looking for inspiration. It has a really great search feature on it too. So-. You just start typing, you don't have to do anything. So, I'm going to look at poster and you just press enter. All of a sudden, boom, you got that much posters. Yeah I actually used this site today. We're working on a project now where we're going to have to be drawing a portrait of someone. So, I just searched portraits on Design Inspiration and I was able to look at a bunch of different styles of how portraits were rendered. So it's a pretty cool site to be able to use. This site definitely has a lot more design-related artwork. So more on the graphic design side rather than illustration, but it's definitely a great source for actually even using your color palette to, there's a color feature on this where you can actually say I want to use these colors. And it will find those colors for you. Yeah definitely a very powerful site. So when Dan and I were looking at geekposters.com today we picked out a few examples of what we think are successful poster designs in a few varying styles just to kind of give you an idea of the wide range of what Geek Posters can look like. So this poster, this is a Weezer poster by Decoder Ring Design Concern from Austin. This is just an example of a completely typographic poster and you really don't need to be an illustrator and really be putting into paper and drawing some elaborate landscape. The Geek Poster can be as simple and beautiful as this, and you know they have a lot of nice touches in here like using some transparent ink. It's nice to see that if you just want to go and typographic route you can totally do that. That's pretty cool how you can show all your information only using text and the program on color and textures. You wanted this? Not this one. Yeah. This poster is by John Bovril, from his company called The Bungalow. This is a good example of using a lot of illustration in your design. He's definitely a very talented illustrator, and he's old school. He draws everything with his hand, and ink on paper, scans it in, and then does his color separations off, probably, on a computer. But, most of this is him leaning over a desk and drawing the old school way. Which is a really cool thing, that a lot of people are forgetting that's still a thing. So, this would be great example just showing how much illustration can be used and making the texts more of a secondary element. So, the first result of this illustration. Then one quick note on this poster is, if you are going with more of a hand drawn look, you might also choose to hand draw your type, and do something totally custom. We'll talk more about typography in the next two weeks, but it is something to start thinking about at this stage, is how do you want to incorporate text into your poster? Is it going to be a typeface, or are you going to draw by hand? So, here's another example a poster, where, it's still using illustration, but not necessarily in the way where you would draw it all in the beginning and scan it. So, this is by Dan Styles, and his stuff is very vector graphic, minimal, and most likely all created on a computer. He doesn't really have to create these shapes, and then scan it in. These are literally just vector shapes. But, this is more of the graphic design side. So, you just choose what you're comfortable with in terms of your skill sets and that will help you decide on what style to go for. Yeah. I mean, it's really up to you. Even if you're uncomfortable drawing by hand, maybe for the purpose of this class, you want to give it a shot, if you feel really comfortable working in illustrator, or vice versa. If you are an illustrator by hand and you want to try your shot working on the computer, you can kind of stretch your boundaries a little bit. Yeah, you don't want to frustrate yourself by trying something they haven't done. But, at the same time, challenging yourself is what's going to bring you to the next level as artists. So Dan, if you want to actually bring up the Skillshare project page now, one thing we're going to be mentioning a lot in this class is the idea of getting a second opinion, and getting feedback from your peers. It's really awesome that we have 800 people participating, and there's going to be an opportunity to get a lot of feedback from your peers. So, by all means, post your projects in the class page here. You can see how many projects are there already. Basically, keep an open mind. If you get stuck, this is a great place to ask for some feedback from your classmates, and we will do our best to respond to any questions that are out there. We'll try to comment on as many designs as we can, and try to take things out that we think are good examples and good lessons that people can learn from. Just to expand on that, Nathan and I will both be, independently, giving our comments on as many poster projects as we can. We also have an intern working for us as well, that's going to be filling in the gaps because we do have 800 students, and we're not going to be able to personally get back to every single one of you. But if we had three people doing it, it's much more likely. Yes. So, Jeff Rato of Rato Design, who we collaborate with his firm quite a bit, and he's a very talented designer. He's going to be collaborating with us on the class, as well. So, if you see Jeff's name pop up on your project, he is going to be helping out with some feedback as well. So, we'll try to give you a few different perspectives, and try to be as helpful as we can with our comments. So, I'll go ahead and introduce, I guess, the sketching portion. Unless, you wanted to say something else. Yeah. No, I think we can move on to sketches. So, I'm showing you this very crude sketch to give you an idea of where we start with stuff sometimes. Nathan and I will talk about our concept and, yes, we'll agree on how it looks verbally. But, we do need to make sure that we are on the same page when it comes to the visual. I don't want to just run right into a perfect beautiful sketch right away. I just want to make sure that we are on the same page. So, I make a thumbnail sketch, which is like saying a very quick version of what you're going to end up sketching. So, this will be a thumbnail sketch of our latest poster for Umphrey's McGee, and then it ended up being more revised into this. Yeah. So, definitely, when you're in the phase where you may have two or three ideas that you're deciding between for a poster, it's a good idea to start with those thumbnail sketches just get something down in 30 seconds on a page, and it's a little bit of a proof of concept to see if it's working or not. Once you think that one is working, you can develop it into more of a refined sketch, like you're seeing here. Now, one other note regarding this that I put in the lecture notes is that, sometimes when we're working with clients, we don't even show them a sketch, and sometimes we simply write the descriptive paragraph about what our concept is and get that approved. Now, unless you have a close relationship with your client, sometimes it's best to show them a sketch, or show them some progress, so you know you're definitely on the same page. But, sometimes if it's a client that we've worked with a lot, we kind of have an idea of what the project is going to be, we just go with a description. That can also be a great way for you to just get your ideas down on paper, and use descriptive language to try to explain what you're going to be doing. You can see an example of that in the PDF version of the lecture. So, while we're on the sketch topic, we're going to be bringing up the same project in every lecture, and we've chosen our Dave Matthews Band poster. This is the official sketch that we created for that. In this case, this sketch, you notice we don't have typography in here yet, we kind of knew it was going to be minimal, and we just jumped into this project kind of knowing that we add it later. However, I would say that at this point, if you know that typography is going to be a central focus of your poster, and you're not doing something minimal, then I would highly recommend incorporating type into your sketch. We'll show some other examples of that now, as well. The sketch over, I mean, it's important for your client to see, but it's also important for you to see, in terms of how you are going to design things. I mean, being able to see the composition come to life, being able to see where you're going to place this this text, will bring up questions that you might have not asked yourself initially. It's really helpful when it comes to the design process of the sketch, will it actually be used like on your art art board and illustrator, and you can draw over it. So, when we are presenting sketches to clients, oftentimes will present a- I think I've lost connection with you, Nathan. Nathan, are you there? One second people, we're having a small technical difficulty. You there? Yeah. Okay, you were frozen for a little bit. It's okay. Everything stopped. Okay, So going back to this PDF. Yeah. So, I was basically explaining, well, where did I leave off last time you heard from me? I don't know, you kind of cut off right in the very beginning. So, I think we can just start all over. Okay, yeah. So, this is basically an example of a presentation PDF that we would present to our clients, just so they have a little bit more supporting information than just a pencil sketch. So, we include some reference imagery to kind of give them an idea of the style, and a little descriptive paragraph because sometimes as the artist, you might know exactly where you're going with your design, but they might not be able to see that or visualize that just based simply on a sketch. So, we try to show as much as we can. In this case, this project was for a Bluegrass festival in LA called the Bluegrass Situation, and we presented three designs to them in this PDF format just to, one, have them select a design. But two, to give them an idea of what the final would look like. So, even though you're- You cut off again here. I think we're dealing with a slow internet connection or some sort. Give it a moment. Right. You're back. I am. Okay. I'll bring it back up again. I'm not sure how long you talked after that but, I guess, one topic I want bring up too is moving on to typography in your sketch. This is a good example of how big it is going to be, where it's going to be located, how important you're going to present it and we're showing in three very different ways. For example, this would be like more embroidered within the illustration and a little more subliminal whereas this is very small. It's all of the illustration, and this will be right in your face, and its getting the information right away. Yeah, that's also something that kind of falls under planned considerations as we have some bands that come to us that want their name really huge and front and center and then there's other bands where they do want something a little more minimal. I think that is about it, is there anything else we need to add Nathan? I don't think so. I think we can move into a few minutes of Q and A right now. I wrote down a couple of questions from the discussion of board that I wanted to address. One of them was about, for the purpose of this class should you be working in, kind of, preparing for a screen printed poster versus a digital poster? We're not going to cover a whole lot in this class in terms of separations for screen printing and a lot of the file prep process and pre-press. So, I think maybe some day we will teach a class specifically about that. But for now, if you're not very familiar with screen-printing, you may want to just design knowing that you'll print is digitally, it will be a little bit easier. However, it's another great place to stretch yourselves and we will be talking a lot about screen-printing throughout the next three weeks. Most of our posters are screen-printed. So, if you want to follow along with us, we can, we'll teach you as much as we can about preparing a screen-printed poster. You'll see in the coming weeks that it will also kind of affect the style that you choose of a little bit. Just elaborate on our initial portfolio that we had was pretty much exclusively digital posters. However, when we design them, we like the look of how screen printed posters look. So, we limit our colors and it's a great way to kind of limit yourself in terms of your design. So, you don't necessarily have to design specifically for screen printed posters, but you can design, in terms of like, letting yourself and colors. That is just, basically, how to print it out. But from a distance it would looked like a screen printed poster. Yeah, and then one other question that was posted, it was about whether we'll be covering our process for how we create textures in our posters. I guess in the week three lectures, specifically, we'll talk a little bit about creating textures. That module is more about putting the finishing touches on your design. However, since we don't go into very much detail, if you have any specific questions about creating textures, feel free to post them maybe we can get a discussion thread going that's just about texture. We'll do our best to bring that up again in the coming live chats that we'll be doing in the next two weeks. I think that's a great idea actually for the discussion board asking about textures, because it will get kind of specific and technical and nerdy or we're going to be talking about LPI and DPI and making sure you have the right files. It's a lot easier to visually show it, but if you write a specific question, we will answer as detailed as we can. Yeah, so, I think we have about 10 minutes now, if you want to see if there's any comments or questions that we should address. Okay. So, I am refreshing these comments. Can I read a couple? You are unable to see it, right Nathan? No. One person's asking, "How many concepts we usually present to clients?" That's very relative. Three is a great number because it gives them three choices. You can present three solid ideas and they happen to tell you that they have to pick one. If you would have shown one concept and they didn't like it, then you're kind of going back to the drawing boards. So, that's kind of a tactic of showing multiple. Showing too is kind of the happy medium between that but we're going to end up having one concept you like more than the other, and the client might pick the one that you don't like. So, if you have three and you make your first one the one that you like and kind of subliminally share it that way, it's a little bit more of a mind trick I think. Yes, clients always seem to have a way of choosing your least favorite option. So, if you can avoid it try to only present options that you want to move forward with. All right, so we have Blake asking if we can give any resources on screen-printing. I guess a great way to start, obviously, would be searching that through Google. We learned how to screen-print by just reading about it and finding out what tools we need. It took a lot of trial and error. Nathan probably knows more about that than I do because he's the one that pursued it first. Yeah. I think it is either this week, I'll post it again if it's not there. But there a creative mornings lecture that Jay Ryan did. He's a poster designer that does everything by hand and creates his separations by hand and it's really impressive. In his lectures, he goes into a lot of detail about the process. But yeah, in terms of resources, I would just say go a little library and get some books about screen-printing. You can really find the basics there from burning screens, creating separations. Then, beyond that, it's quite possible that your local community college teaches a screen-printing class or you may be able to find a lecturer or something to attend. I would say with screen-printing, it is one thing to read about it, but you'll really take it to the next level once you can be hands-on with it in their classroom setting. So, I would highly recommend trying to seek out a class for learning, but I would say if you can't do that then YouTube is a great resource as well and just whatever you're looking for, how to burn a screen. There'll be a video for it. So, one question I'm seeing here from Chris Shaw is a little bit more specific to our studio. I think a lot of people ask this question, so I think we should put it out there. But he wants to know how we split up the design when we collaborate. I guess the quick way to answer that would be I'm more of the illustrator and Nathan's more of the graphic designer. He's also a very good art director. So, a lot of the times, Nathan will be kind of over my shoulder, so to speak, when I'm creating in illustration, but he'll wrap it up in typography and make sure that it's very relevant to the clients and I'm guessing I'm more like the cranky artist type. Yeah, I would also say that we are not the type of studio where each person is assigned a specific project, and they work on it the whole way through. We basically collaborate on everything that we do. It varies a lot, who's starting the project, and how we're finishing it. But typically, we're passing a file back and forth, and adding elements, and are directing each other. So, our hands really are in all the projects that we do. All right, so I'm going to look down here a little bit. Someone is asking about common poster sizes. We're going to be bringing that up in the second lectures. Is that correct, Nathan? I believe so, yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, does that the low down of that is we use a lot of 18 by 24 sizes, and that is overall very easy size to print, it's a little more cost effective and very easy to ship. A whole poster world usually uses 18 by 24, but it can also change depending on who you're making it for. A lot of movies use more long dimensions, so more like a 24 by 36. Also, it really depends on design. So, if your design is circle, and it looks better inside a square, then go for it. It's really up to you. If we were to pick one favorite size, we would say 18 by 24. Yeah, and this also kind of goes back to the question about whether you're going to be printing digitally or screen printing? If you just want to go digital, and you want to print 11 by 17 posters at Kinkos, that's a great option, too. When we first got started, and we'll show this in next week's lecture, we were printing mainly 11 by 17 posters simply because that's the only printing that we were aware of and that we had access to. So, I would say, if your screen printing going any larger than 18 by 24, it's probably going to be a challenge in terms of finding screens that will be able to work with. But, yeah, 18 by 24 is definitely a standard in the gig poster world. All right. So I've seen some themed questions here about how we choose our concepts, and more specifically, someone is asking about our Black Keys Poster with the space shuttle launch. There's lots of ways to go about it. You can make the poster very much about the bands. Another option would be to make it more about the venue. This poster would be a kind of a combination of both of them. For the Black Keys Poster, we consider the music to be industrial, kind of hard, edged, straight classic. Then at the same time, this poster was for an Arizona show, and Nathan, what was the actual venue name? It was very aeronautical. I think it was like the US Airways Center or something. Yeah. That on top of the fact that NASA and Arizona. So, we kind of combine all of those ideas into one image, and having a rocket basically coming off the ground is also a very powerful look. So, we thought like that matched the aesthetic of the band that are also kind of to the hat to the actual venue location. Yeah, and I guess kind of looping back to when we were talking about concepts for your poster. If you can incorporate the location, that's something we often try to do. Like we were talking about, you want this poster to be something specific and if it is a Black Keys Poster in Phoenix, you shouldn't just be able to slap on Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden and it works exactly the same. It should feel specific. So, we often try to incorporate the city or the season or something specific about the time and place into the poster. Then one other thing about how Dan and I come up with our concepts is, another benefit of being a two person studio with very different people, is that we're able to bounce a lot of ideas off of each other. Oftentimes when we start brainstorming for a design, we will throw out the most ridiculous or obvious ideas that we can come up with first. So, for the Black Keys, it would be black khanna, black piano keys, or a black key going into a door lock. We know we probably don't want to do something that obvious, but out of those kind of silly conversations will grow a more unique idea. So, again, this class is a great forum if you are in that stage where you're starting to come up with a concept but you don't know what it is yet, post about it, and see if someone else has some feedback for you that might be able to add a unique twist to that idea. So, how we do on time work? It's been about a 40 minute lecture. Do we want to cut it off? We have time for one or two more questions, and then we can and we'll try to answer any remaining questions in the discussion thread for this lecture. So, we have a question here about how if the band specifically asked for a style or do we always propose our own ideas, and both happen, a lot of times a band will say what not to do, what to do, though referenced something we've done in the past, and say, "We like this style, can you do that for us with your own twist?" We listen to every word they say, and we try our best to compromise, so we're creating something very original and unique. Also, in a way, repeating something we've done in the past, and doing exactly what they asked us for. So, this is kind of like a more global question in terms of how designers work with their clients, but we experience both avenues. Yeah. It's tricky because a lot of people will come to you for a particular style just like a director might come to an actor because they know they play a certain type of part. Sometimes it's tough because we don't want to do the same style again and again. So, yeah, it's definitely a balancing act to try to incorporate their request and kind of giving them what they want, and for the reason that they came to us. But at the same time, we do want to say, ''Hey, let's put a unique spin on it for you.'' A lot of times clients are very receptive to that, to the idea that we're going to do something specific for them, and not just repeat something else they've seen in our portfolio. Do we have time for one more, I think? Sure. All right. Let me try to pick a good one here. Okay, this is a little more for the later portion of our design lecture, the entire course, but someone is asking about our color palette, and how we choose our colors. That's something that's usually ends up happening later in the design process. I guess to put it very quickly, we usually have very primary colors starting out, and it's just to kind of show, okay, we only use three colors. There's going to be a blue color, there's going to be a hot color, and there's going to be a black or white. That will kind of help us differentiates what we're creating, and making those light and dark areas. Eventually, we'll start refining that color scheme, and so doing it, making it a little more part of a full palette, and that time is really helpful when you're looking at reference imagery from, let's say, design inspiration. See what kind of color palettes have been created, and how you can make it applicable to what you're designing. So, throughout the process, we're always looking at other people's work, and be inspired by it. That's actually is a great, of the Skillshare site's great way to use that as well. So, when people have their posters up in their project area, you'll be able to see what color schemes they like, and you'll be able to borrow those ideas with your students. Yeah. This is another good chance to go back and think about what specifically makes sense for a particular band. We'll cover this in upcoming lectures. But if you're dealing with a band that has a very somber, depressing sound, then maybe you don't want to do a super great neon primary color scheme, and vice versa if you're like, ''We just did a poster for the band fun.'' And their name kind of says it all, but we did want something that was bright and playful in terms of the color palette. So, the band will definitely inform your decision on color, and then the print method again, when we're screen printing, the vast majority of our posters are only three to four colors. So, we need to choose colors that we specifically know will work for everything in the design. So, I think we're going to wrap up this lecture. But we definitely have a lot of questions I'm seeing here. We're going to jot them all down, and answer as many as we can under the discussion board. So, if you have anything to ask now, you can go ahead and type it in. If we miss it, you can always ask us through the Skillshare site. Yeah, for those of you who are watching the video version of this, and didn't join the live office hours, feel free to post on the discussion board, and we will answer as much as we can. So, thanks again everyone for participating. We're really excited about teaching this class and are looking forward to seeing all your designs. I guess I should mention that the next milestone for the class is coming up this Wednesday, which is when you should be posting your poster sketches. I know a lot of people have done that already, but if you have yet to do so, you have a few more days to start posting your sketches, and then we can all start commenting on them. All right. Thanks guys. Happy designing! 3. Initial Design and Illustration: Module two week two is really all about taking your sketch and your concept that you've decided on and bringing it to life in your final file. You could jump right into illustrator if you choose to go that route you could work with a hand drawn design. It really just depends on what is comfortable with and how you want to challenge yourself. This is also a good time to revisit your reference imagery and try to get an idea of what style you want your project to take. In this project we're going to be using an example that we've talked about a little bit already. Dave Matthews Band, Toronto poster. So, we'll start talking a little bit about how we determine what style we were going to render this poster. So as you can see with our sketch, we wanted to illustrate a tree and an elk essentially. So we actually made reference imagery folders of an elk and a maple tree, so you can see just photographs of the people's work that we are exploring where we want to go and it really helps us to try and determine what's been done, how you can improve it, what kind of things are you going to be up against. It's elk for example. Probably, the more interesting part of this is the maple tree part and the branches and leaves are obviously a key component to this design. So one thing that really inspired us were these Japanese maple trees. You could see that their branches are very organic looking. We would approach this in a hand drawn style by doing it hand drawn, but we want to give ourselves the freedom of actually being able to move these branches at our leisure and once we created it, we want to basically move the composition around, we won't have to redraw anything it's all in the computer. So, what you'll see here is we actually have a process video for this whole thing. You can see that we've put our reference imagery on our board just so we have something to look at. We have a sketch and it is going pretty fast right now, but what I'm doing is essentially creating a custom brush and this brush will be used to create all the branches. So right now, I'm basically, I create a rectangle and I'm screwing up a little bit given the branch appeal so it's not perfect, and is that essentially one branch, there's another branch and I'm turning into an art brush. So, as we mentioned in the written lecture, we were talking about you can either go a handwritten approach or a vector computerized approach. We try to create a happy medium here where we have the best of both worlds. We are using a brush to try and make it look hand drawn and we'll add to that later by using textures, but at the same time we're giving ourselves the flexibility of having something in the computer that we can rework. So, you can see that these are all individual pieces big/ small whatever, so I can move these things around and let's say it looks kind of funky in one area, we can take away branches, we can add branches, we can make this look anyway we want. So, that's definitely a huge advantage of using a computer rather than doing this hand drawn. A quick note about the dimensions, this art board that we're working with here is 18 by 24. So in terms of the dimensions of your poster, we typically work at 18 by 24 for the vast majority of our work, and there's a few reasons for that, it's a standard size in the poster world. It's easy to screen print at that size, if we need to print two posters up on a 24 by 36 parent sheet, that's easy to do. It's also just in terms of our travel and displaying these at shows and shipping them in tubes, it's easy to just have a consistent size, but that's not to say that you can't work at a different size for your project. Remember too that you can also use Corazl version of this too. So this is 24 by 18 for example. So, if you have something that's a little more of a landscape that lends itself more to a horizontal composition, you can do this as well. So in terms of other dimensions like these are examples of something that's holding a circle which a square format is fine, and these are definitely pretty small for posters, but you can print large as you like. This will be an example of making a narrow poster, so we wanted to show basically a gameboard, and if we were to put this onto an 18 by 24, there'd be a lot of extra space on sides and it wouldn't quite fit in it's composition. So, we decided to cut this down to a custom size, and the designs are more efficient that way. Now one thing to consider is that if you go with something like an 18 by 24, or a 16 by 20 or 22 by 28, those are all pretty standard frame sizes so if you don't want to frame your work that's something to think about in the case something like this you would probably need to get a custom frame. In terms of really narrow stuff you can print a nine by 24. What's great about this size is that you can print doubling this up, so essentially axis if it's one sheet, 18 by 24, so you can print two posters at once and double up your money if you're selling this. But this will be an example of nine by 24 and then here's an example of something horizontal using the same technique. One other thing to consider if you're not going to be screen printing your finished product or if you're not sure yet, it can be a lot more economical to do a digital print and a lot of our early work we did just digital prints at a 11 by 17 or 13 by 19 and that allowed us to just get it done at a local coffee shop. You don't have to worry about color separations and everything that goes along with screen printing. So, that's a really easy way to get started and also a nice way if you just want to print out one poster to take a look and see how everything is looking in terms of scale, that's a good way to go to print digitally. This size is actually really cost effective, too. I think it's like anywhere between one and two dollars per print whereas if you were to do an 18 by 24, a digital size, it would be pretty expensive to think of anywhere between like 50 bucks and higher. So, this is a great small little size that can be printed off of laser printer or offset printer. One other note on dimensions is that even though we decided on 18 by 24 pretty early on in this project because of printing constraints, you do have the freedom to mess around with it as you go and determine the dimensions if it makes sense to change it as you get further along in the process. The next thing we want to talk about is composition and you've probably heard this before, but the rule of thirds is something to keep in mind when choosing a composition. In this post right here is a good example, you can see that there's a very clear third cut, it's not a perfect third, actually I think it might be number design is back in the day. So, we got the first third actually above water and two thirds underneath and it's a lot more easy for the eye to absorb and there some old tricks that we use that make a perfect dimension and perfect composition. So, this poster would be a great example of that. Then, I guess the other thing would be to talk about use of negative space, which actually going back to that poster you, can see that we didn't need to use the entire composition filled with illustration to get our point across. We have a clear illustration and everything else around it is pretty much all ambience, so don't feel like you have to fill in the space with detail. One thing we often see when people are first starting out is that they try to fill every square inch of the poster and there is text going wall-to-wall and it can feel really crowded. So, here's another example of a poster that we did, where we have a central image and really just left the rest of it alone, no border, kind of nice just to have one little area at the bottom that's bleeding off the edge of the page. You still get a really strong visual impact even though more than half of this poster is blank. But just another reinforcement that you don't have to fill up your whole page, feel free to play with that negative area. If you have a strong concept, use of negative space can really sell that. For instance, this concept is more powerful by having so much blank space around, it leads the eye to the center, you only look at illustration. Another big thing we use is symmetry. Symmetry is something that is very appealing to the eye. It's very subliminal, it's easier to look at. If you use asymmetry, it's immediately going to bring out tension in some sort of form. You can use it to advantage, but symmetry creates this iconic feeling. We use it in a lot of stuff, you can see here, here's a good example of all the things we're talking about. Rule of thirds, symmetry, negative space and we kept our illustration minimal, but we got everything we wanted to have in the poster without having to say too much. Yeah, I guess just to summarize this portion about composition is, if you find yourself with opportunities to work with the grid, to have things line up nicely with each other, go ahead and take advantage of that. It'll give you a much more professional looking poster if things appear to have a rhyme and reason to their placement and they're not just floating randomly. Another thing we can talk about now is color palette. For the purpose of this class, we've mainly been talking about screen printing and how you might work with colors. When you're screen printing, you're probably going to be working with a limited color palette maybe only up to four or five colors. That can kind of work to your advantage in terms of the style of your poster and the kind of the tone that you want to convey. This poster here of the National, we already had a concept in place, we wanted to create the band's name in a mini golf course. I got really excited about this concept so I really went all out and I wanted to have like the fake river and the balls. I just really thought about all of the details without actually looking at the big picture. What ended up happening was, I am using a lot of different colors and it's not really conveying a mood. The music for the National isn't happy, it's a little bit more moody. So, that image was an in-progress shot and then, this would be a good example of how we minimized our color palette, and really brought it down to the bare bones. What happened was, yes it's not as fun, but it's not supposed to be a really fun looking poster, it's supposed to be for the National. Their music conveys this deep dark mood, that can be beautiful, hence that's why we came with this for example. So, this is also not to say that you can't use a full color photograph or do an incredibly colorful poster. If you choose to, you could come up with a beautiful design with that approach as well. But because we work with screen printing most of the time, we've gotten in the habit of primarily using a limited color palette. But another nice thing that screen printing allows you to do is you can use transparency and actually have a limited number of colors over print on top of each other and it'll actually give you a much broader color palette. An example of that would be this cake poster for example. It's using only three inks, and we're able to get a lot more than just three colors out of that, and that's how overprinting works. So, for example, the main colors you're seeing are brown, orange, and this teal. By overprinting let's say the orange over the brown, we're getting this muddy orange look. We're getting a lot of different colors by mixing these main colors that we've chosen. What's great about that in screen printing world is that it's already creating a body of color that works well with each other. So, if you chose to grade colors like, for instance orange and teal, when they mix together they're going to create the perfect baby and it's that great muddy till that will look great in your design. So, that's definitely an advantage when using screen print techniques and overprinting. This is definitely a slightly more advanced technique you don't have to use overprinting in your design right now. There's still plenty of times that we don't bother with overprinting and we just use additional spot colors because we know we want a certain number of specific colors in a design. You can get started using a range of maybe 10 colors and challenge yourself to narrow it down, how can you make it work with three or four or two. In the end, it's another way to get that professional cohesive looking poster that you want, where it really all feels like it's part of the same family everything is in the same style it's a nice way to unify your design. So, in terms of your progress with Module Two, this is a good example of about where we were halfway done with this Dave Matthews Toronto poster that we're using as an example. We basically have our composition ruffed in, we've started to work with some details like texture. However, this is going to be a four color print, we're only dealing with one color so far. You can see we're starting to get this idea of a gradient going which we're later going to add in some leaves to mimic that feel. But this is, if your post here somewhere around here at a half way point that might be a good milestone for you. One last thing, at this point we haven't included any typography yet. Depending on your poster, there's a good chance that you've already gotten a lot further along and that would be great. We ended up tweaking our typography a lot at the very end of this project. But this is just one example of where you might be at this stage. Another thing but think is important by printing out something that at this size, actually full size halfway through your process. If you're able to do it cost effectively, it's pretty helpful to see where you're at and see how big it's going to actually be. It's always a bummer to work on a computer for so long and then have to go to print and then you see all these things that you can see once it's on paper. So, now this is a full size, we can see how small this texture is going to end up looking, and it gives us a better idea of where to go. 4. Optional: Previously Recorded Feedback and Q+A: Hello out there. Welcome to week Tto of Rock Poster Design. Let's hold off just for a second because I think we're still barely building people up. Okay. I see one viewer right now for some reason. Well, welcome to. You can welcome the one viewer. We double check and make sure the link is available. So it is. All right. Now it started to work, we have 23 viewers. All right. Let's go on. I guess we can start by just saying that we are very impressed with everyone's progress so far. There's a lot of really awesome projects being posted, and it's also nice to see all the great feedback. I know at least in all the projects that I have commented on, by the time I get to the comments there's already a bunch in there. That is really productive and useful feedback. So, yeah. I think everyone is doing a really awesome job of collaborating so far. Yeah. Agreed. So, we can start off by answering some of these questions in the discussion board. I guess you want to start by talking a little bit about textures and halftoning, and that we're going to talk more about that. So, we've been getting a lot of questions in regards to halftoning textures, and how we do it, and also the students that are asking what to do with their files. The reason we haven't given too much detail on it is because in this portion, the second week portion of the class, we'd like everyone to really nail down their design as much as possible, sand texture and halftoning because we don't want you to use us as a crutch, we want you to make beautiful art work and have it be very stable on its design, and then at the very end, texture will be an additive rather than something that you need to make it look better. So, what we'll do is probably in the next office hours next week, we'll go over in detail. Half tones for us, we usually end up doing that at the very last step of our design. The reason being is we want to have all elements in place, and be able to move things around, and once you start halftoning then we can't resize anything, we can't reangle anything. So, it could slow more freedom. In your design right now, currently, you can add as much texture you want, but you don't have to have toner right now. You can make sure that it's just a raster transparency of some sort, and then eventually, once you get to the very end, you want to do your separations. That's when you can wear the halftoning. That's one technique to go about it. The technique we've shown in the second lecture video was more for using one small element of your poster in halftoning that one area, but I think a lot of time a lot of things that people are asking are how to half tone an entire file. Let's say you're using a lot of different grains or drop shadows everywhere down to your last minute step, and we'll go over that. Is there anything else you want to add, Nathan? Yeah. The other thing that people are asking in relation to halftoning is that they're saying that they did our texture technique and created a half tone bit map, but they are still looking to create the color depth and lighting effects, and things that we have in some of our posters. So, we'll talk about that more next week as well. It's essentially the same technique as creating a texture, but you can go ahead and create, let's say you're working in Illustrator, if you are creating gradients from one color to another or you want highlights or shadows or dropped shadows. Those are all things that you can then half tone later just as you would your textures. So, we'll kind of cover all those different bit map related topics next week, so you can add depth to your poster in addition to just a flat texture. You can also be using gradients and shadows currently in your design just as you normally would. Getting those to be one color half tones is what we're talking about. So, your artwork can be as vector as you want, as smooth and raster as you want, it really does comes down to your design style. So, just keep moving forward with what you're comfortable with, and we'll move into the whole separation process with more detail next week. Yeah. This feedback is really geared toward people who are either planning on screen printing their poster or they want to have that screen printed look of half tones using one color rather than using a range of color to create gradients and shadows and things. So, if you're planning on printing digitally or you don't want that look to your poster, you can basically ignore this information. Yeah. Okay. So, I'm going to open up my screen and share it or do I need to share it. So we just go over the questions in the discussion board, and we'll just go back and forth. Yeah. So, I guess just to kind of tell people what we're going to do tonight, we'll probably go for about 45 minutes again like we did last time. We're going to start by answering some questions that were posted on the discussion board for tonight's office hours. Then just like last time, if you want to close your questions in the chat right now, you can, and we'll get to as many as we can, and then we'll post some answers afterwards as well. So, the first question that we're going to talk about now is from Cannie. He was asking, how do we manage our files and how do we organize our projects design resources and anything else that's a way that's organized and accessible for both of us, which is a great question, and something that took us a little while to figure out what works best for us, but we use Dropbox and we've been really happy with that, and it's nice because everything is stored in one central location. So, Dan can walk you through one of our projects to show you how we would organize a particular Dropbox folder. So, I'm opening up a window here, and this is for one of our latest projects for Umphrey's McGee. So, you can see this is basically how we organize all our files. It all will change slightly depending what style we'll use, but this is a very general layout out for us. So, we have a working files folder which is our Illustrator files, and all versions of them. So, it's also important to make change in your file to save it as a second version because you never know when you want to grab something from a previous version. So, for this case, we've got our different files all the way up to the final. Then we have a reference imagery, and this was all stuff that we used to reference in terms of the aesthetic of the posters. So, yeah, Marty Ross stuff and Data Dead stuff, let me make this a little bigger. So, reference imagery and we have links. This is where we put our textures, hence the photoshop files, jpegs, tips whatever. So, we have texture for our paper, texture that looks like feathers, and that's a good way to organize any links that are basically linking to our Illustrator file. This final folder I'll get to, but here is drafts. Drafts are a good one as well. So, when you export your image as a jpeg, for example, you will be able to organize it in a folder, and you'll be able to see every version that you've done. It is helpful to see like "Oh, I like what I did in version three vs version six." Then you can get an idea of where you're going, the timeline of your entire process. Then we have an area for our comps and sketches, which is basically our first folder we usually create along with reference imagery. So, this will be our original sketches and our PDF that we sent to the client and whatnot. So, for the final folder this is what we use more for the printer's purpose. We have our PDF separations, we have tip separations depending on what the printer wants. Our printer referred to have PDFs, and as you can see up here, this is a four color prints. So, you're seeing four different layers. Then we have our final AI file separated and color proof. So, this is a good resource for the printer as well, so we can know what colors to match to. Is there anything else you want to say about these new theme? Yeah, I mean I guess just another great use of Dropbox for us is that once we are done with the project, it's really easy just to send a link to this folder onto our printer and it's basically, all ready to go. So, another good reason to keep your files organized. So, it will be really easy for the printer to work with and they won't have to hunt for a linked file or anything. So, Dropbox is both how Dan and I manage our files, but it's also a nice way to share them with vendors and clients too. All right. So, close that up. Next question is from Bob. He asked, what is a good rule of thumb for leaving a margin on a print, if you don't want a full bleed? So, this really is going to depend on your design. I would say, just in terms our work, our most common size border or margin is a half inch. But it really is just going to depend on your design and if you want a bigger or smaller border. It's basically, the same thing you would do when you're dealing with framing a piece of art, you know how big do you want the map to be, you want to have a double map, stuff like that. So, I'd say we have some posters where we've gone with a lot more negative space around the edges and a bigger margin if we wanted to have a little bit more of a frames look and maybe a little bit more of a fine art, idea to it. Whereas, a half inch is kind of a nice clean line to set off and kind of give you a background, but I don't know if there's really any rule to it, other than just experimenting and seeing what looks good with your artwork. I think also typically, the larger the border, the more retro and vintage it looks. So, we've used it for certain artwork just to kind of give it. It does give it more like an artsy look, when it's framed and the bigger the frame is almost accessed as manning on your link from your art piece. So, what actually another thing that's great about border treatments is a when you do frames and you get, lets say you've made too much frame for a poster frame, you don't really have to map if you already have a border that's already covered. It acts like a map.Right. Another question here is from Johnny. He was asking and actually a lot of people were asking about if we could create a tumbler or some type of blog for everyone's final artwork at the end of the class, and we did ask you on share about that. They're totally on-board. They also just mentioned that the student project gallery for the class is going to exist forever. So, if you ever want to look back at this class, you'll be able to. But I think what Johnny was more after is I guess in the student gallery now you have to click into a project to see the final poster. Whereas looks like a tumblr, you could just scroll through other finals. So, we'll reply to this question in the discussion board as well. But, if you're listening, the answer is yes. Johnny please move forward with creating that tumblr, and we'll link to it and then people can start adding their work in there when we're done with the class. Make sure that the tumblr looks really good, well designed as well. All right. So, moving down the list. I guess we could do our critique next. David had asked about if we could do a live critique of a poster just to kind of give an example. So, what we're going to use is Nate Harris had posted a question about using color and texture in his poster. So, we're going to use that as an example. So, sorry to put you on the spot Nate, but we're going to dive into your poster now. So for those of you following along, if you want to look at Nate's project, if you click into the discussion for tonight, the week two office hours tonight, and scroll down toward the bottom of links to Nate's project. All right there, are you seeing this, Nathan? Okay. So, I'm going to go to those projects. There they're. So, don't be nervous Nate, we are choosing you because we like your project, is not because we want to prepare a new one. We really liked the concept. Essentially, we're looking at Victorian women with these law dresses. There are also mountains. It's got all those reference imagery. A stylistic approach of how he wants to go about this typography, and he's got a couple rounds. We have a gray-scale version with five women. We have this version with three women that are more emphasized as mountains, and then we have the latest here. It's just one woman. So, we're going to give comments on each of these versions because there's something we like about each one. Hopefully, this would go into your design as a final. So, we really like how this one is going about. The reason being is it's very clear that this is Mount ranges, just faced off showing the road which is also really interesting because we're not really showing very much, but it's very clear immediately. The text too is also balanced, something really interesting. That's really cool color scheme. So, there's a lot of good things about this that we think that is going in the right direction. In the next one, there was a couple issues that we wanted to talk about. To start up with what we do like about it is getting her to look more like a mountain. It's obviously being used very successfully. We're a little bit hesitant about the rock climbers and the people for a couple of reasons. One, it's changing the era that you're trying to portray here. We've got the Victorian woman and you have contemporary rock climbers. It kind of takes us a little bit out of the concept a little bit, more of takes us out of the world that we're trying to create. Get them to do out on that. Yeah. At the beginning of Nate's project, he did a great job of listing out adjectives and descriptive terms about Edward Sharpe, about Alabama Shakes, and also about the location of the show in Colorado. It's that Colorado Porche and that he had written down skiing snowboarding outdoor sports. I think one thing that we have been addressing in the class a little bit on some of her comments is that a lot of times, less is more. If you can take things away and refine your project to what's most minimal state, a lot of times that can be very successful as opposed to adding more concepts. So, when Dan and I first look to your project, I think we were both very drawn to your second comp because you definitely nailed the feeling of, this is a road in Colorado. At the same time, you were getting a lot of these adjectives you were mentioning. So, for Edward Sharpe, you mentioned three open inspirational Western, soulful big sound. So, you're clearly getting that feel with this poster. I think particularly when it comes to Western and soulful, it is a little bit more of a vintage feel which is what you're doing here with the type and illustration as well. Again with Alabama Shakes, you mentioned Southern soulful funky groovy big sound. I think that's working for this one as well. So, then when you get to Colorado, I think all your other adjectives are right on big mountain, this wildlife valleys. But I think what we're finding is like Dan said. Once you add in those rock climbers and cyclists, it starts to feel a little less about the band and a little bit more like you're promoting Colorado. So, I think you were well on your way to a happy balance and possibly just pulling out some of those elements could help you get back to the focus on the style of the bands. So in terms of the color scheme, I think that both are working for these but I think for interest of the bands, the warmer color scheme is actually working a lot better. Also, it works well with being in an outdoor scene, whereas this is putting us in a theatrical environment that is a little bit more fantastic. Even though this is a fantastic concept, I feel like we want to put ourselves in an environment as well. Yeah, I agree with all that. Like we're saying, this project is on a great track and you've clearly done your research and are executing exactly what you are intending to do. So, please take this criticism as it's intended which is just to be helpful and encourage you to continue with it. I guess since we did use Nate as a guinea pig, we should answer his actual question which was basically how you should approach? We talked about color a little bit. He also wanted to know about texture, which again we'll get into more next week, but we could just answer briefly. He said, "Should I switch red rock textures with cracks and folds or should I approach it a bit more simply with subtle grainy textures?" I think you could do it either way. I feel like we would probably do the latter because we'll be creating some of those cracks and folds with just highlight and shadow in the vector file, like you're doing here. Once you add in a grainy texture on top of the whole thing, it'll basically make those look more like a real mountain. But Dan, what do you think? He could do it either way, it just depends on what kind of look he wants. Yeah, this is reminding me a lot of what we did for explosions in the sky, which we did the latter. So basically, let me see that one really quick. We took our design and played with it mostly in vector. The texture was something that was very much an afterthought. So, right here you're seeing us create this rock texture and it's all just polygonal nodes and vector shapes. I'm not even using them. I'm still just seeing your retract window. I just realized I'm only showing one screen here, hold on a second. Let's open up this guy. Now you see that? Yeah. Okay. So, this is our video for our explosion sky poster and you can see once we had our sketch, we started just going straight to the vector. There's really nothing else going on other than that. We're just dealing with polygonal shapes, not even using any curves and I'm basically creating a various like vector looking rock. So, you're able to create all those highlights and shadows essentially pretty easily using vector shapes. The rock portion where you get to look really grainy is an afterthought that we applied later which, let's see if I can find it since we had our final piece, there you go. It's going to be super fast but basically we brought our entire vector shape in there and really used as a masking point. So that's when we added ambiance to the edges, we added grain, we found imagery that represents the rocks that we're looking for, for instance that. This is when we used a stamp tool to get a more consistent crack area all over the place and we laid that over the whole thing. So, it's really not as complicated as you might think, it's just we have our entire vector shape and we're adding textures on top of it and then that could be saved back into your Illustrator files or PSD. You don't have to halftone it, you just basically have an image with a transparent background. So, now we have it back in there and I'm adjusting the Photoshop file over and over again to get it to look better with the Illustrator file. So, I guess that answers your question. Just get your drawing as close as possible as you'd like it without texture and then use texture as something to help make it even better. But, it should look pretty good at a vector state. Yeah. Another good thing about doing it like this is now you can get every crevice and shadow, and highlight exactly how you want it in the mountain rather than try to hunt down some image that is going to have the crack running in the right direction that you want it to or something. So, I think since you're already building your mountain in vector and it looks really cool with all the facets that you have, I think you should just stick with that. I think that that, let me see, is there one more question? Stephanie wanted to hear more about our work on music packaging, which she acknowledged was off topic. I would say that it is very similar to our poster process. When we design album packaging, obviously, it's a different format and different information is being included. But in terms of concept development, it's very similar to what we did in week one of the class. You're seeing our website, right? No. I'm seeing the YouTube page. Hold on a second, okay. So, here's our portfolio of album packaging that we've done. Interestingly enough, it's not something we do very often anymore. My theory is basically that no one's really packaging their music as much. It's mostly MP3s and everyone wants to send out in cover. It's an unfortunate thing, but luckily posters are still very popular. But, I guess in a way that we approach these things, obviously, we have the square format which changes the way we work. Then we also have the opportunity of doing large landscapes or centerfolds, basically, like once you open up a digipack, for example, you can do a much larger image that's much more horizontal, whereas with posters most of what you deal with is either a square or portrait. So, I guess, beyond that there's a lot more typography involved and it's kind of a more traditional design approach. That could be challenging just to make all that information look good. Then, you have the disc itself, which is always a fine thing to figure out how to make that look appropriate to the design that you've already created. Sometimes it could just be something super simple. Other times it can be completely integrated. She also wanted to know if we have a dream client that we would like to work with. Dead or alive? That's a good question because I was going to say, I mean we've talked about Radiohead. I think we'd like to do something for them. But, if we could do like a Beatles retrospective album package, that would be pretty awesome, too. Yeah. If we're going to talk in the realm of dream world, why not do like Jimi Hendrix or Bob Marley or something, but or James Brown. We could go on forever like these titans up in music that we really appreciate. But, I think living, yeah, Radiohead's on that list. It could be cool to do a Muse poster or something for Muse. I think Foo Fighters have been on our list for a while. We're 90s kids. So, not like we're born in 90's, but all our music is really attached to the 90's. So, Red Hot Chili Peppers is one of those bands that we the boys liked regardless. So. Oh, and that reminds me of another question I wanted to answer, which is that some person that was really paying close attention to one of our pre-recorded videos said that they noticed that there were some instrument cases in the background, and wanted to know if you play music. So, whoever caught that, and hopefully I can find your name, the answer is yes. That Dan and I got started playing in a band together in high school. That was kind of our first collaboration was, playing in the band and kind of making- there it is. Picking up some stuff here, let us see if we can find a picture of us. Yeah. There we go. There's Nathan's brother was in the band. They're both the drummers. I had dreadlocks. So, this is where we came from, we're all musicians. This look, I was really into it. Yeah. So, we collaborated in the band and then we started making our album packaging together. Then, kind of continued not as much with the music now, but [inaudible] more the design side of music. We still have our instruments, we just don't play them anymore, really. Then one last question I wanted to get to before we jump into the live questions. Kevin has posted a few times asking about the business side of things. He wanted to ask about fees and contracting. Do you charge differently depending on the band? Do you have preset fees? I think to give you the short answer, I would reference what Mark Brickey usually tells us, which is asking how much a poster costs or what graphic design costs is kind of like asking how much does a house cost. Before you can answer that question you need to know what kind of house is your customer looking for. So, I would say design pricing will change based on the client, based on the scope of work, based on a number of factors. Then in regards to contracts, I would say we kind of have a standard contract that we use that has been developed over time. If you're looking for a place to start with a contract, AIGA is a great resource and they have an extremely long graphic design agreement that you can choose what you need. So, we can post some resources through that on the discussion board. I'm liking this question from John. What are some good ways to make a font look less perfect, low-tech, hand drawn? Well, one easy way would be to actually hand draw it. So, you could type out whatever you'd like and design it however you would like. But, let's say you printed out and then draw it by hand by tracing it, that gives it a whole new look. Actually, we have a poster, couple of posters I can show. Showing that. So, for example, I would go to big posters. First time we did this was for Iron and Wine. The reason we did was because the drawing itself was very organic looking, and the type ended up looking a bit too clean. So, what we did right here, you can see it is, we printed out the actual text that we're going to use, but redrew it with a thick pen, basically, to give it that wobbly look. It definitely has a whole new look to it and it's all derived from an existing typeface. We've done that a couple times. So, I think a lot of people think that when they have a font, they just aren't done with it, but try to alter your typefaces as much as possible, it really will help, and try to think of it as an illustration. So, if you can look at typography next to your illustration and think of how it can be fused into that style, I would approach it that way, rather than keeping them as two different worlds. Yeah, I think another thing on that note is if you are using a typeface that's supposed to look either kind of grungy, or eroded, or something that's trying to look hand drawn, a dead giveaway that it's a font is that all the same letters will look the same throughout. So, for example, with that Iron and Wine poster, if you were using a hand-drawn font, all the eyes, both the eyes and both of the ends would look exactly the same. So, if you're dealing with a phrase that is repeating the same letter, definitely go in and tweak those repeating letters a little bit just so it's clear, that you'll trick people a little bit who might think, "Oh, I recognize that hand-drawn font". But then, upon closer inspection, if it has those unique attributes for every single letter, it will give the illusion that it is actually hand drawn. So, here's an example of altering type. I think we're using Gotham, or something like that, but if you are adding drop shadows in certain areas just to give it a light source, give it some little more interest. So, the shape of the actual text isn't even changing, it's just what you're doing inside it, for example. Let's see. Obviously, there's ways of just creating type from scratch. If you want to just go from that. But, these both derive from existing typefaces as a template, and we created our own take on it. Yeah. So, like the bottom. if you can go back to the national for a second, Like the bottom one, we've started with a typeface and then just used the grid to make those look like tiles on the bottom of the pool. Then, same thing with the golf course, we just took, what was a much shorter, typeface and extended it, so it fit our composition. So, yeah, there's a lot of ways that you can tinker around with typefaces, and make them into something that feels like a unique formation and a unique lockup, and not simply that you just typed it out. Let's see, is there anything else we wanted to go over in terms of these questions, or is that all of them? I think that's it, if you want to take some more current questions. I'm not seeing any comments in our feed. Probably, because we haven't asked that we want to do it. But, if anyone has a question, live, that they'd like to ask, go ahead and type it into the YouTube area, and I think it should come up for me. Such a weird process because I'm just talking, I have no idea if people are hearing me or not. Yeah. I'll just take a look here and see if there's any other questions that we already answered, that we want to address on here. Okay. So, now I'm seeing comments coming through here. Okay. So, we have, "With regards of selling our work, do you need permission from each fans? For example, Dave Matthews Band, do you need permission to make an art print?" That changes on a client to client basis. It depends on what sort of licensing they're looking for, what their budget is. A good reason why we would end up doing an actual art print, was based on how the bands have limited funds for the project, and they agreed that we could keep the rights to the artwork. So, then we could be able to get a more of a profit from project, by creating an art print, and for the band, they have a poster, and that we'd be also able to walk away with portfolio. But, in terms of having permission for selling the actual poster, some bands are pretty particular about it, though, it gave you like a cut-off in terms of how many prints you can actually make. It can be anywhere from as low as 25 to a hundred. So, that changes as well, from band to band, and it really depends on who they are. Yeah. But, yeah the short answer is that, we definitely do need permission in each of our projects before we actually start designing. Starts with a conversation with the band and determining how many posters are they going to have, how many posters are we going to have, what price are the posters going to be sold for? Yeah, it depends, it varies a lot. Some of our clients have very complex contracts that we sign, where sometimes it's a full rights transfer, where they own it completely, and we can't use it for our own art prints or anything. Other bands, it's a little bit more lax, and they will grant us permission to retain the rights to the artwork, and we can do what we want with it. But, if you are looking to sell your artwork, it is essential that you have that band's permission in writing before you attempt to do that, and you know what the specific terms are, because it's good to protect yourself as well and you don't want to work for a low price or for free, and then to find out that this band just keeps cranking out your posters forever and selling them. So, you want to try to find an agreement that works for both of you, and make sure that you have it on writing . So, we're about at 45 minutes. I did want to address one person's question before we end, which was "Are we going to be able to review and comment on all the designs?" Obviously, on these live, office hours, we won't be able to. It's just way too many projects. We have over 300 people already submitted their projects, and I'm sure more are going to be coming in. We've been keeping up as best we can to get to everyone. No, we haven't got back to every single person yet, but we are doing everything we can. We've got Nathan and me, and other helper constantly having comments and keeping up with people's progress. So, we'll continue doing that and there's still two more weeks of more review that we can give, through the website. So, keep an eye out for that. If you do not see anything from us for a while, it's always okay to message us and get a little bit of reminder. We'd be happy to review that way. In terms of these other questions that are coming in through the broadcasts, we'll do what we did last time where we'll address most of them and type them out into the discussion board, as a big answer. So, anything else we should add before we go? I don't think so. Everyone's kicking out so far. So, keep up the good work. We only have about a week left. We'll do our final office hours, again, next Wednesday night. Then, the final projects will be due shortly after that and again, it sounds like we'll have a Tumblr set up, where everyone can post their final projects. They'll also be in the student project folder on the Skillshare class, and all this information will be accessible at any time. Then, again, we will be looking for, I think we said we would pick one project that we would post on our blog, but I think we'll probably end up with a handful that we'll want to showcase, just seeing the quality of work that's coming in. Yeah. So. Keep up the good work. Right. Bye guys. 5. Refining Your Design: So, as we're approaching week three, you're probably well into the design process and you have something close to a final with your posters design. This is a really important stage where we really take everything to the next level and we discuss how we can improve it and refine it even more. We'll go over how to make custom typography or refine existing fonts. The additional texture they can use, it really take something that looks very vector and turns it into something more three-dimensional and dynamic. You might have a full design that looks good from a distance, but we always like to add little tiny little bits of Jones to make it really interesting. It's something that we really enjoy doing personally. Maybe the client will notice it immediately, but on those that done the line, and it's just make this whole process much more enjoyable. Here is a screenshot of our Toronto poster. Again, a work in progress on the left. One thing we were kind of struggling with a little bit was the placement of the band name and how we were going to get to incorporate it in an organic way, rather than rendering the type in a style similar to the hand drawn branches. We knew we wanted to give this a clean modern look. So, we were going to use a typeface, but in the version on the left here, we knew it wasn't quite integrating as well as we thought it could. So, what we ended up doing was the final on the right, where we still have that clean typeface but we ended up tucking it in to the branches. We just thought that was a nice way of incorporating it into the design, but still being able to use a little bit of a contrasting style. So, that's an example of what you can do at this phases of the process. Take some time to step away from your design, and when you come back, you may be able to find some solutions like that. So, in terms of actually stepping away from a design, one challenge that I always find is getting the likeness of people's faces, for example. So, this poster we did for Adam Carolla, this is the final poster. However, there was many stages in between where I could not get down the likeness, and Nathan seemed to understand what it is that would make him look more like Adam but I couldn't see it, and the reason being is because I was emotionally attached to it. I have been working on it for so long, and I basically have to design blinders on. One thing that I do to help me through this is I actually will reverse the image, and this actually helps you look at it in a new perspective and be able to see the flaws almost immediately. So, after doing this on my own and that both sides were good to me, then I'm at a point where I realize that I'm reaching that conclusion that's actually where I want to be. But if something looks funky like his nose looks crooked and way turned backwards, most likely it's because his nose is crooked. Now also at this phase, you can start focusing a little bit more on typography as we just mentioned. We use it as a style example, but now we'll talk about it in terms of integrating it into your design. We have a couple examples here. If you don't want to just do something totally custom or you don't want to use a typeface, this is an example of a poster that we did where we started out using a script typeface as a base and ended up turning it into this bicycle chain, or in this case, unicycle that doesn't have a chain, which was the idea we were using for this poster. But it was an interesting way where we could start with a typeface but put a unique spin on it and really create some unique typography for a poster. Another example is this fish poster, where the typography is really a focal point of the poster. In this case, we didn't really use a font, we just used our own layout, and this was really something that we worked on in the sketch phase and it took a lot of refining to both have this symmetrical shape as well as creating the letter forms that were legible. So, those are a couple of examples if you do want to try to stretch your typography a little bit to do something that is a little more custom. One more note on typography. We want to talk a little bit about typographic hierarchy, and that's pretty important when you're communicating information like you are on a poster here. For example, in the Dave Matthews poster, you can see that the band name is really the first read, first and foremost, yet this poster included support bands, opening acts that would probably be the second read. Then in this case, weren't really minimal showing the information at the bottom, the date, the venue, and the city where the show took place. Now, that's typically all the information that we include since most of our posters end up being sold at the show, are kind of merchandise or memorabilia as opposed to actually announcing the event. Now, if you happen to be working on a poster for your own band or for an upcoming event where you're going to be using this poster to advertise, you might need to include a bit more information. So, another thing that helps execute our posters and can help you is using texture. This is something we get asked a lot and it's very hard to explain through email and having a visual aids, going to definitely help us here, but, for this particular Dave Matthews Band poster, this font you're seeing right here is the black lair and it's using texture. From a distance, it looks as if this is actually wood, but when it comes to the reality of being printed, this is really just a black and white file. I'm actually go step-by-step through the process of how this happened. One thing to take note of when it comes to this kind of use of texture along with better shapes, it's a great way to get your vector shapes out of the realm of like a clip art, super clean style. It makes things a lot more realistic, it adds dimension. So, we use texture a lot more for our posters these days and it's very helpful. If you want to create a texture, I use Google imagery a lot. Let's say I want to find a picture of wood. You want to make sure that the picture you're choosing is royalty free. Don't steal people's work. But for the sake of this argument, we're just going to pick a piece and go for it. You want to find a high-res image. This is a great example of some wood. Obviously, this is a full color image and we not could be able to use it if you're using limited colors since the screen printing process, but you can reduce that down to Photoshop. This is how you do it. So, right now, it's full color, it's RGB. You want to immediately turn this whole thing into a grayscale image. So, now you're only dealing with blacks, grays, whites, and eventually, you want to get this all just to be blacks and whites. You don't want any of the grays. Just because that's how the screen printing process works, it's either positive or negative; there's no in between. This is where you want to play with levels. If you want to show more of a mid-tone, you can. If you want to show more dark, you can. Basically, bring it to anywhere you want. So, for the sake of printing, I just want to show grain. Maybe somewhere around here is a good point. If you bring it here, then you're only going to get a couple lines. But if you want to get some of these mid-tones, you can bring around here. This is where the technical side comes in. So, you move from grayscale to bitmap. Bitmap means that it's basically going to turn everything to pixels and only black or white pixels. There's lots of ways to do this. In terms of outputs, you want to do 300 or above. I usually do 600 pixels per inch. That allows as much detail as possible. You don't need to go any higher than that. We use halftone a lot. You can use diffusion but that has some issues with screen printing because the little squares are going to be a little bit too hard to print since they are so small. Halftoning allows you to make dots, and those dots are big enough to be printed. So, this is where you can choose the size of the dots. Choosing a line per inch is really important. Printers usually are typically comfortable with anywhere between 25 and 35. So, for this example, I use 25 lines per inch. Your angle is also important in terms of how many colors you are going to use. That gets a little more complicated in terms of more ray patterns, and I can show you in a different example, but for this one, we're just going to start with the angle 22.5, which is a great starting point. You can do ellipse or rounds. Both are going to be a circular shape. You can also do lines, for example, how we got this picture right here. The [inaudible] getting on this poster was using lines which you see right here. It's very small, change the poster that just gives a little bit of a dark edge. But I'm going to use dots, and they're going to be round. From a distance, it looks pretty much the same. But when you move up on into it, you realize that you're only going with dots and it's only black or white; and this is how you want to create files for screen printing. This is kind of a nutshell of it, and this is just one image that you can use in your design. So, you want to save this as this important step as a TIFF and that allows you to bring it into illustrator and use it. So, I'm going to store this on my desktop in a cool wood texture, TIFF. We are going to open up a new file and I'm going to place it. So, that's a file I just created. You don't want to resize too small because you want those dots to be the right size for printing, but I'm just going to bring it to our box for the sake of showing you how to use it in a vector shape. So, let's say you want to create a wood texture within a design that you've created. I'm creating a tree, this is very crude, this is a beautiful branch. So, that's the shape right there, and this could also be turned into a clipping mask. So, what you want to do is grab both images and make into a clipping mask. All of a sudden, that image is now inside the shape, and this is just a very quick way to show you how we can put textures inside the shapes. What's great about turning this into a tip is that you can change its color. So, it can be anything you want. Let's say, we have three colors and this particular color is green, now I have a green wood branch. Another nice thing about that is in addition to adding texture, you can also take it away. So, you could add a texture like this in white and put it on top of a shape, and that will actually be making holes in your design. Now, we realize that for those of you not familiar with halftones and screen printing, this is getting pretty technical, so this is definitely something that we can address again in my office hours if you have any further questions about creating textures like this. Now, in terms of finalizing your poster and adding other things to at final steps, one thing we always like to do is look for any opportunities to add some hidden gems to the design. We like to think that if someone buys one of our posters or they're going to hang it on their wall, we want them to be able to look at it a year from now and maybe discover some new things, details that are in the poster. So, this poster that we did for BigTop Pee-Wee is a good example of trying to add some little things in here. One example is the ringmaster, his tiny wife is hidden in his pocket here, which is pretty microscopic on the poster itself but hopefully something that people will come across. Another thing that we like to do is in all of our posters, we include our initials in every design, hidden somewhere. So, you can see in these apple trees, we have DK there, and across the way in another tree here, we have NG in. So, if anyone's interested, you can go back and look at our entire body of work. We have DK NG hidden pretty much in everything we've ever done. A big reason why we like to add a lot of detail is because people are going to be buying these posters and hope we hang them up in their rooms, living rooms, in their houses. They don't want to get bored of them after a week. You want them to be able to look at it for years and then discover new things as time goes on, and it makes what you're craving much more special when it has those hidden gems and those extra details. So, even though you think that the design is good from afar, take pride in what you're doing and add an extra stuff that maybe only you're going to enjoy. So, as you're getting toward the end of your design process, typically, when we're going to be showing our progress to our client and getting their first take on our design. It's important to keep an open mind at this point in the process because you've been slating away your design for weeks, or months, or however long it's been, and that's your baby now and you hate to hear someone else who doesn't like it or doesn't think it's working. So, when we get a feedback from clients, we try to first of all step away from it for a minute, let ourselves digest it for a moment before we decide how to respond or what we're going to do to address the problems. Another thing we try to look for, and this is something you can try as you get feedback from your classmates in this class and also get feedback is try to take your personal opinion out of it. Rather than saying, I like it or I don't like it, try to speak more in terms of why something works or why it doesn't, and basically, try to reason your way through logic. I think it's pretty typical for a designer or an artist to think like an artist, which means that you're very sensitive and everything you do is very personal. But this class is about design and design is about compromising for clients, specifically for this band. If you're creating something and you think it looks beautiful but someone says, "Well, it doesn't really seem to match well with the music we're making it for." Really take that into consideration rather than taking it personally. It's not about how your artwork isn't good, it just means that you're not directing your focus towards the problem, that's bore this band. It's hard to hear it at first time. I mean, that something that's Nathan and I have been practicing our entire career and sometimes it is really difficult when you work on something for so long and then you hear you have to change it, but it is for the best. The more you swallow your pride and develop this tougher skin and realize that this is for something bigger than yourself, then you create something they've never done before and actually ends up being pretty exciting. So, now we're arriving at the end of Module three, and if you have been following along, hopefully you are also close to the final stage of your poster. This is how this poster ended up in its printed version. We were really happy with how it turned out. I think like any project, there's always things that you see after you're done that you might want to tweak. So, we may have wanted to go with a slightly finer half tone texture, or tweak the colors a little bit, or just transparency of colors, but those are all pretty minor things that you'll start to develop as you make more and more posters. One thing to remember when designing is that we constantly are watching everyone's projects and we're going to be picking one particular project to share on our blog. We also have a growing social network that we'll also share it on. So, put your own into this and we'll pick you out hopefully and we'll share what you've got. Yeah. So, thanks a lot for participating in the class. We hope you enjoy it. We hope you learned a couple things about poster design. Thanks for participating. 6. Client Stories: Or how we ended up working with Flight of the Conchords. I feel like the story of beginning to where it ended up was definitely a part we should mention. We were big fans of Flight of the Conchords prior to working with them. We were signed up for their mailing list. And this is where they're really big on HBO, I think the second season was just about to start. We were creating posters already. But, we didn't have like huge clients and Flight of the Conchords would've been one of those huge clients that we will love to have, but they sent out a contest notification through their mailing list saying, we're going to do a poster contest and it's going to be for our TV series. We said, why not? Let's do it. I think there was about thousand submissions and it was like a month long process of watching other people submit, deciding on how we're going to create a design that is different enough, can impress them, and stand out. So, I think we waited about two weeks into the design contest period and submitted something. By the time everything was submitted, it was about a thousand designs. And I think they broke it down to the top 10 or something like that and we were in it, and we were just so stoked. We were really excited. I think just a couple weeks later, that's when they announced that we were the winner, and that was definitely a big breaking point in our career, I think. So, what happened that afterwards as we had our poster advertised on our website and that linked to our website, and then eventually they started hiring us for other stuff. Since then, about five posters for them, somewhere around that. Yeah, one thing that's been exciting about it is we've got the opportunity to meet the guys, Bret and Jemaine, and actually found out that they are huge poster herds and know a lot about the poster community. We even found out that they fight over number one in the poster edition of which one they get to keep. So, it very flattering to get that feedback from them. Yeah, Phish is a band that has a crazy cult following. Their fans really love the band and part of that is this poster culture that has grown up around the band where the fans that see them are really excited to buy posters of the shows and to see every single design that gets mailed for them, and going along with that they are a very critical mass as well. When it comes to a band like that, we really want to make sure that we're satisfying the fans and that they feel like they're getting a quality product that they're expecting. So, in the case of the band like Phish, they love having tons of detail like we've talked about a little bit in the class having a lot of little hidden gems and hidden imagery. So, there's always something to discover. So, its an exciting challenge and it's always a little nerve wracking whenever we have a release with them because we're as curious what the fans are going to say about it. But, yeah, luckily, we've had some good luck with them so far and we've gotten a lot of good feedback. I think once we get our first poster with them, that's kind of when we opened the doors, and we've done several since then. What's happened with that, too, is that our styles changed since our first poster. We've realized that the fans are so rabid and are so detail oriented that you wanted to put a lot more detail into these posters than we ever have in any poster. So, we actually broke through some of barriers that we had with like half toning and texture and just how much detail we put into these posters. We're up against some of the titans that have been making posters all their lives, and to hear that word, to par with what they're doing is really really flattering. One kind of exciting and surprising thing that happened is the band sent us a photo of a fan that had tattooed one of our poster designs on their arm. So, that was kind of fun and different to see something like that. Yeah. We printed another print for Gallery 1988 and the theme of the show was Bill Murray. So, we couldn't decide on one movie that we wanted to do a poster for. So, we printed a poster representing all the movies he's ever been in and ended up being 150 icons all representing his entire career even if he was in small cameo or something, and it ended up being a really popular print. This was our first time we were really playing around with icon design in a poster and it led to a lot of very interesting things.The biggest one was Paramount Pictures reached out to us and they said we really loved what you did for Bill Murray, our hundredth anniversary is coming up and we would like you to do something in the same vein. We created a poster, basically, for them that represented a hundred of their films and it was definitely twice as much work and very challenging, but also one of the most exciting projects we've ever done, anywhere from a classic movie versus something that we've never seen in our lives like Justin Bieber, Never Say Never, or something like that, but everything is in the poster and it was so enjoyable to distill everything from that movie down into a simple icon. And the fact that it's been for Paramount Pictures is huge. It was very exciting to work with them and look at their full body of work and distill it down to a hundred different movies that could represent the 100 years. And classic movies like The Godfather are on there. And yeah, it definitely felt like it was some part of something much bigger than ourselves. 7. More Creative Classes on Skillshare: