Party on the Vanguard is the annual fundraiser (extravaganza). This design is a really simple and bold proclamation of what/when/cost. 2 different layouts — vertical (snail-mail postcard) and horizontal (email).
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Civilization (All You Can Eat)
How about I just quote from the play description:
Set against the 2008 Obama campaign, this dark comedy explores the lives of seven city dwellers looking for more. A frustrated filmmaker, a suicidal comic, a career waitress, an amateur porn star, a failed academic, a fame-hungry actress, and a feral factory hog all pass under the gaze of an indifferent universe.
Poster (11×17):
Huge thanks to the following for the images used in the poster and postcard:
- Boar woodcut illustration from 1658 courtesy Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries
- Public domain Perseids diagram from 1880–1881 from Popular Science Monthly Vol. 18
- Perseus and Perseid Meteor photograph by Dominic Alves
Salon Vanguard, 2011
The Salon Vanguard is one of the annual parties hosted by SVT. This was to be a particularly classy party and I’m particularly pleased with myself for putting a silk hat atop the logo. Elitist? Well, I never!
Postcard (8.5×5.5):
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Guest By Courtesy
This was a blast to design with these awesome photos by Erica Nix. It was so much fun I insisted on different layouts for postcard and poster to highlight different photos. Plus I got to channel Pablo Ferro while drawing the title.
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Heddatron
This is definitely one of my more peculiar constructions. It’s not a color palette that I would have initiated but with enough finessing I grew to love it like one of my own. Original wallpaper design with gold gun/robot motif and vintage enamel picture frame. ROBOTS!
Poster (11×17):
Salon Vanguard, 2010
The Salon Vanguard is one of the annual parties hosted by SVT. The diagonal striped background has become the signature design element of the Salon series of party invitations. And this being a sort of a holiday party, The background image is a blurred photo of some delicious, sparkly sugar cookies.
Postcard (8.5×5.5):
A Brief Narrative of an Extraordinary Birth of Rabbits
This lengthy-named production of a modern play was inspired by an actual event from 17th century England. There was live-action acting, puppetry, and video projections. I combined an 19th century engraving of a rabbit with close crops of photographs of English Victorian paper dioramas that I shot on a vacation at a London toy museum and layered them atop some video scan-line textures for that certain je ne sais quoi.
Poster (11×17):
House Pizzeria Logo
House Pizzeria is a fantastic independent restaurant that my good friends Scott and Sarah opened in the spring of 2009. It was in 2008 when they were still early in the planning stages and they asked me to design their logo. We went through a few rounds and came up with some good ones and some…crazy ones. For this final candidate we created a simple one-color version like you can see on the pint glass below and a more rich multi-color version that is used in places like on their website, signage, and t-shirts.
Go there and eat the logo.
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Iphigenia
This play incorporated a lot of video projections and rave/club-style lighting which I wanted to express in the visuals. The type and SVT logo was composed in Illustrator and exported as individual images. There are overlapping color swirls (long exposure photos of xmas lights) that were also exported as images. These were assembled on a DVD slideshow which was played on my CRT television. Each image was paused for a macro photograph to get all that scan-liney, bitmapped goodness. The resulting photos were then layered in Photoshop with just a bit of opacity and color adjustments. And that’s my secret sauce for creating a high-resolution low-resolution image. You’re welcome!
Poster (11×17); Postcard (5.5×8.5):
Unbeaten
This performance was a series of improv monologues inspired by professional football. Now, I don’t know much about football but one thing I do know is that I like the look of my own handwriting. My other favorite element on this project was creating the little logo in the bottom-right corner for the fictional Professional Football League (the PFL!). And I was extremely fortunate to have received the assistance of Mr. Saville in creating that mean looking logo for the Omaha Oxen (also fictional, by the way). Grrrr.
The rejected design (on the right) is included here because it’s cool and I’m really fond of it. So there.
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