Library Marketing Designs for Tennessee & Friends

Website home page web banner repurposed the art from the sign and handbill design.

The simple design evoked a style from another era.

Welcome to another installment of Art In An Hour. In this example I had a library event request for publicity development waiting for me to begin for weeks only to be continuously pushed back off my radar while other more pressing, urgent priority projects kept flaring up. So, what could have been a "luxurious" time frame for concept development eventually dwindled down to hours. In an effort to keep bailing projects out of my congested schedule as quickly as possible, 

I spent about an 20 minutes to illustrate (using Adobe Illustrator) a simple concept that--to me--harkened back to the simple television show lead-in artwork styles of the 1960s and 70s, a time when Tennessee Williams was a literary star that had his works turned into feature length films. I selected an Adobe Illustrator vector-based clip art silhouette image of a man, placed him in Adobe Photoshop to blur the edges, then placed him into my Adobe Illustrator artwork where I completed the rest of it (walls with Library logo and text, suitcase with floor shadow and headline treatment in it). I then imported the black/white art into an InDesign layout file so that I could place the remaining body text because I find working with larger amounts of text to be easier in layout applications than in art applications.

Quarter-page handbills were simply
scaled down versions of the 8.5x11 inch sign.

The illustrated concept was to simply show an opened suitcase sitting on the floor, placed in dark silhouette by a brilliant ray of light coming from an open door behind it. In the doorway would stand the silhouette figure of a man, either Tennessee Williams or Victor Campbell, the latter being a man who would be speaking at the event about having been given the suitcase by Tennessee Williams for safe keeping some 30 or so years earlier. The artwork was a simple and stark contrast between light and dark for easy, eye-catching viewing--as well as quick completion on my part.

The publicity request required creation and delivery of two 8.5x11 inch printed signs, 40 quarter-page handbills, and one web page banner ad. Once the sign was created, it was easy to copy and scale it down to handbill size, then repurpose portions of it for use as the web banner. Thanks to the simplicity of the design, total production time was right around one hour for all of the collaterals combined.