I had the pleasure of designing the ADC Paper Expo poster and promotional materials this year. It was a total blast! Usually designing for designers can be a bit tough, but this process was totally smooth as Laura Des Enfants’s main art direction was to make something awesome. Long live paper and print design!
XXMaking this design look like cut paper actually took a bit longer than I thought it would. I kept trying to make it look as though the type were cut out of a white sheet (basically the inverse of what I ended up with). After looking at a lot of cut paper art online I realized that the characters and scenery were almost always made out of the paper rather than cut from the paper (positive vs. negative). Once I changed things around to work this way I had a eureka moment and thought “ok, I think this will work out and not look like shit vector art…hopefully”.
XXOne of the hardest things about this project was that I had the opportunity to work with 5 ink colors if I wanted to. FIVE! I’ve never had that chance before with the usual crappy print budgets of other clients. I kept trying to think up ideas that would allow me to use a metallic ink or overprint a gloss varnish — something, ANYTHING, special and expensive. In the end, I knew I wanted to make it look cut paper-ish and there was really no need to do fancy printing. I had to accept that fancy printing conceptually didn’t work for the poster, which was tough. Designing appropriately for the project is one hurdle that I think a lot of people have trouble with. Everyone (including myself) want’s to fancify everything even when it’s not necessary just because it feels good to make fancy things. I’m really happy with how this turned out and can’t wait to see the actual printed mailer. Thanks ADC for an awesome project! See you all at the event! Here’s a big version in case you didn’t get the email blast (and even if you did get it, this one is the correct version—for the blast they exported my file incorrectly (overprinting of the shadow didn’t show up). The perils of handing over a vector file.)
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Art Directors Club Paper Expo
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Show Opening in Melbourne Tuesday Evening!
I’ve been on the other side of the world for over a week now but wanted to make sure you all knew about a solo show I’m having in Melbourne which is opening on Tuesday night. It’s at a lovely gallery called Lamington Drive in the Fitzroy section of Melbourne. I’ll be selling individual prints of the drop caps (some not yet available for purchase in my store), and all with a fancy bonus especially made for the gallery show—a little blind letterpressed logo in the corner.
The show will also feature giclee prints of the first three alphabets, the letterpress print of the first alphabet as well as well as several other prints. Come! Hang out! Buy a print without having to wait 4 weeks for it to be delivered to you! (effing customs). See you there hopefully!
