Jammin’ In January II

Top: the poster. Bottom: the web ad.

A slow-down in work during the December holidays allowed me to work further ahead than usual on some upcoming event promotional materials. Thanks to the crack planning of the library staff in Hawthorne, I was able to begin work on Jammin’ in January II, a teen music festival that encourages teenage singers and musicians to come to perform at the library for a teen-only audience. 


The work request for publicity asked for: “White paper with some color in the background or letters. What I'm trying to convey here is that the program showcases teen musicians and vocalists and is primarily for other teens. I would like any characters in the sign to reflect the demographics of our community and high school, which is roughly 50/50 African American and white.”


I followed the brief, but had difficulty finding public domain photography that supported a teen 50/50 racial audience mix. I did find a few other images that I thought could work, however, and submitted four design choices. I lobbied for the concept shown here for a variety of reasons. Thankfully, the librarian organizing the event concurred, approving this one over the others as well. 


Because most of the work was already done during the concept stage, there were only minor things to tweak to complete the design. This design is a compilation of two separate photo images: the jumping singer and a generic swirling background that I changed the hue on to be slightly bluer than the grey it began as. I made the headlines slightly translucent and added an outer white glow. To help the headlines stand out a little more, I added a soft drop shadow as well. 


I kept the colours subdued and cool to reflect the season, and added some snowflakes to reinforce that sensibility. After a test printing, I discovered my light grey and blue colours printed darker than expected, so I went back to lighten them even more and add more contrast on the singer to brighten his skin tone. A last minute change was made from using the numeral “2” to become a roman numeral “II”. This helped reduce any confusion over when the event took place, as it was easy to initially interpret the event date as “January 2” instead of reading it as being the second annual event. Overall, I was very pleased with the result of this series of promotional materials.


Items requested to promote this event included:


1 Large format 20x30in. poster (an enlarged version of the 11x17in. sign)
2 Tabloid-sized 11x17in signs
30 pages of quarter-page handbills
1 ACLD website homepage web ad