Jazz Poster Series
Artist Branding
Poster Design
2024
The challenge of this series was to create five promotional concert posters that visually represent the unique style and energy of the performers.
I aimed to create designs that would reflect the essence of each artist’s musical identity through striking visuals, color, and typography. The artists featured in order are: Thundercat, Gregory Porter, Robert Glasper, Snarky Puppy, Monophonics.
Beyond aesthetics, this project demonstrates my strong understanding of hierarchy and how these posters function in a setting where the viewer examines the poster from afar. The posters ensure clear communication while encouraging the viewer to seek out the finer details in the poster, maintaining artistic impact, making them effective promotional tools for live music events.
My Thundercat poster design blends hand-drawn bubble type with the flow of the hair, in which a single dread transforms into the cable of a bass guitar. With Thundercat being an African-American bassist, I felt this approach fit his style well. His genre being psychedelic funk inspired my flowing, ever changing composition. This poster was restricted to two colors, so the funk genre reflected my vivid pink and blue color choices.
Porter’s baritone vocals inspired this poster design, with abstracted hands all yearning for a chance to hear his voice. I further accentuated his vocals in the typography, having it bold and bright to represent the rich and complex tones of his voice. I mainly used a complementary color scheme of orange and blue to symbolize the highs and lows of his jazz, blues, and gospel sound.
This poster’s style took inspiration from Glasper’s background as a producer and arranger, including various instruments found in his works. This poster was restricted to two colors, so I kept the color palette and style simple, instead highlighting the versatility of Glasper’s work through the elements found in the design.
Squeeze, crush, mash, mix! Grapology is a fictitious children’s grape museum and vineyard in Sacramento that provides a unique, hands-on experience for children and parents. With its guided tours, Grapology educates their visitors on the beginning stages of the grape gardening process including growing, gardening, harvesting. Then, children engage in the production process of crafting their very own sample of artisanal, organic jams and juices with grapes originating in the Sacramento Area.
To capture Monophonics’ genre of psychedelic soul and R&B, I implemented a crane which symbolizes their soulful and transformative sound. With the poster’s Art Nouveau inspired design, this mirrors Monophonics’ lush, layered, and vintage sound. The colors are mainly muted and pastel, invoking a sense of expression and romanticism found in their music.
This project taught me how to visually interpret sound, and how rhythm, tone, and personality can be expressed through shape, color, and layout. I enjoyed the challenge of adapting my design choices to reflect such a range of artists while maintaining cohesion across the series. It deepened my appreciation for the connection between music and design, and reinforced my ability to create visually engaging work that communicates both at a distance and up close.
