This past weekend Roger Clyne played a show at a bicycle bar in Fort Collins called Road 34. This is the third year in a row, and its also the third year that I have designed the poster. This is the newest one, but I also want to share the previous two and the trials and tribulations involved in their production.

The inspiration is Jose Posada, the Mexican artist who is virtually synonymous with the Day of the Dead. That was the band’s idea, and they let me run wild with pretty much everything else. Take a look at the previous posters and take note of the artistic progression, which (I hope) is getting more sophisticated.

When you’re doing the same show’s poster time and again, you have to look for ways of making it more and more interesting each time. Looking back I find the first poster to be pretty two dimensional and minimal in its elements. With the second one I have more implied movement and other elements introduced, as well as 3 dimensional space. As I was brainstorming for this most recent poster, I was having trouble at first finding a new direction. I had to step a little further outside the box and change up the most simple things I could. These are screen printed at the shop I work at, so I have a lot of control over the actual printing process. So I decided to change the paper from off-white to black, helping to give it that woodcut feel that Posada is actually great with. I’m not really sure why that didn’t enter into my head until this year, but I’ll take it when I can get it. I also changed the alignment from vertical to horizontal, which I still think works well with the design, but came back to bite me in the ass when I went to Road 34 this past week.

Sometimes I forget that the rest of the world doesn’t have the same quality-control embedded in their heads that we get as art students. But still. I’m done making excuses because as I walked in the door at the bar a few days ago, I instantly cringed when  saw this poster hanging on the door:

Apparently someone doesn’t know how to check the landscape button in the Windows Print Wizard, and also doesn’t know what looks horrible. But I can’t have control over the entire process, and truthfully I don’t want to. Sounds like a headache not a blessing. Now these weren’t the final posters that would be sold at the show, just the advertisement on printer paper taped to the windows. Luckily. Hopefully the actual posters were a hit, and hopefully I can stop having bad dreams about the squished ones.