DLM Cheese Show Poster 2011

While I was in Chicago this summer for HOWDesign Live, I went to Willis Tower for the Skydeck tour. While in the gift shop, I shot a pic of the Chicago World’s Fair poster.

In July, while discussing the cheese show poster for my day job at Dorothy Lane Market with our Cheese Director, he mentioned the theme this year was “Cheeses of the World”. I immediately thought of this poster and how it could be a great reference for our poster.

A challenge in creating this poster is what image to use. How to convey cheeses from different countries? Cheeses that might be of different sizes and shapes would be difficult to manage. However, I worked with our Cheese Director and came up with the idea of picking out wedges of our most popular cheeses that would be at the show. I then shot a photo of them:

Then began the long process of tracing them in Illustrator keeping true to the Art Deco colors of the world's fair poster. It took a bit of work, but it did work out:

I then added it to my poster composition and it was a perfect match. I decided to shy away from a straight Art Deco typeface and chose Junction from The League of Moveable Type to give it a hint of the past, but with a modern touches:

Creative Postcard Club: Pantone Blocks

A seemingly easy round this time: fill 15 half-inch square blocks with Pantone colors and arrange them however you wish.

15 blocks of color is a lot of color! Especially since I was determined to use a different color for each block.

I turned to my favorite theme: Art Deco. The very formal and gridded structure of the layout suited the Art Deco style perfectly. The most challenging part was to figure out how to make the color progressions flow smoothly. My first few attempts created a bit of visual chaos until I found the rhythm.

Enjoy!

Creative Postcard Club—R50 Stamps

I’m pleased that I was able to participate in the Creative Postcard Club’s 50th round. Congrats to Travis on a fantastic milestone!

For this round, I knew I wanted the theme of my stamp to be Art Deco. But the genre encompasses such a large variety of work, I wasn’t sure what to narrow it down to. I spent time thinking and researching and decided on “The Art of Wine” in the Art Deco style. I did many a thumbnail sketch and somehow, they just never felt right. So I put them aside for awhile and I was listening to a story on U.S. Postage stamps and they mentioned that typical themes on stamps are the flag, flowers, or American art/artists. Bingo! My idea was born: American Art Deco, represented by an American flag.

Below: flat color version in Illustrator.



After a few sketches, I followed my usual procedure and scanned my sketch into Adobe Illustrator where I set up my colors and layout. I then imported that file into Photoshop where I added textures and lighting.

Below: final image and final image with stamp border appplied.