Author Event: Naiad Press

Hey, while I’m on a roll about author events, I might as well catch up with a couple of my remaining yet-to-post events. Above are the event collaterals for Naiad Press. Founders Barbara Grier and Donna McBride came in October 2010 to discuss the history of their press line--now closed dow--and its 15,000 strong collection of gay and lesbian subject matter donated to the San Francisco Public Library.


Publicity items designed for this event included:


1 23x34in. large format poster (scaled up from the tabloid-size sign)
Multiple 11x17in. tabloid-size signs 
1 ACLD homepage web ad
1 newspaper print ad, black/white
20 pages of quarter-page handbills (4-up on one 8.5x11in. sheet...seen here in its untrimmed state)


The initial challenge for developing a strong visual image for this series began with the photo provided of the authors. If you could only see it. They were standing semi-outside in one of those “Florida rooms” with a screened in porch mesh behind them, looking out on an open wooded lot of some kind in the background. The lighting was dull on their faces in the foreground, then bright and harsh in the background. The low-rez image was poorly lit, blotchy in colour, and hey, poor Barbara had a neck-full of Donna’s intrusive elbow! If I had been Barbara, I would have jabbed Donna back into her side with a good, hard elbow of my own! Everything about the image was less than desirable. It’s unbelievable sometimes what people use to promote themselves. I mean really, is this the best they had to offer?


But I took a cue from the Naiad Press logo, noting its high-contrast styling. I decided to knock the ladies out from their photo to get rid of all the extraneous clutter and focus on them, then saturated the colour and posterized them to whatever extent I could to minimize the poor lighting and colour levels of the image. Using the momentum provided by the image itself, I just pushed it a little further down that path, “making lemonade out of lemons,” as they say. The posterization of them would make an effort to approach having an association between them and their high-contrast logo.


To liven it up more, I added a pink and cyan bar to either side of the purple/black logo. Pink would be an allusion to women, cyan to men, and the colours mixing together would constitute the purple background for the logo, thus, a subliminal suggestion of the coming together of women and men. The only colour lacking from the spectrum was missing was a green, but you know what? You can make a rainbow without literally showing a rainbow, if you know what I mean (rainbows being the chosen symbol of gay pride and community). I’m sure few people picked up on it, but it was there, nevertheless.


The end result was a more colourful, open, and airy presentation which I’m sure was more striking than what the authors would have ever envisioned, all things considered.