This past semester at Parsons I had an assignment in one of my classes to design a concert poster. Let me walk through the whole process from the brief to the final poster, and explain the steps that I took, and the decisions that I made along the way.

The Brief

The band I was going to be designing a concert poster for was the Bristol England based trip-hop group Portishead. The final poster was to be 18” by 24” and include extensive information about the show’s venue, barbes, in Brooklyn NY. The “client” (actually my professor and the rest of my class in this situation) wanted to explore a couple different concept directions that we could then pair down to a final design that felt the strongest, refine that a bit, and get it ready for print.

Listening to the Music

Since I was dealing with a music group in this situation, giving Portishead a fully engaged listen was the logical first step. I put the album on, closed my eyes, and let the music paint as clear of an image in my head as it could. If you are unfamiliar with Portishead’s music, you can check out the video bellow to get a sense.

The first thing I felt while listening was an extremely strong sense of atmosphere with the minimal and slightly filtered drums and bass, layered with unobtrusive but textured guitar and organ lines, a DJ periodically noodling on the turntables, and plenty of space left in the mix for vocalist Beth Gibbons’ sexy, sultry and angst-filled soaring vocals.

The periodic half-step progressions and predominantly minor key compositions layered with single note guitar and organ lines that explored the sonic space like wisps of smoke painted very dark and mysterious scenes in my mind, as if I had stumbled into a film noir crime drama from the late 1940s.

Research

Like all design projects, the first step after internalizing what I will be working on is doing some research. The two visuals that initially stood out in my mind from listening to the music was the wispy free form quality of smoke, and the film noir aesthetic that describes lots of Hollywood crime dramas from the 1940s and 50s.

I found a few images of smoke that resonated with me, and identified what specifically was appealing… namely the organic paths that were created (no right angles or grids) which subscribed to some sort of a loose system, but take on a life of their own… and always a convoluted sense of flow from point A to point B… again like a mysterious crime drama.

This lead me into further exploring this film noir aesthetic that I had loose images of in my head. I found several frames from these films from the late 1940s, so I could better identify the attributes that defined this aesthetic.

I absolutely love the reoccurring motifs of this style, and finding these images reaffirmed my association between this aesthetic and Portishead’s music. Every frame was comprised of very simple but well thought out compositions with very high contrast, often filled with smoke, silhouettes, shadows, and some sort of sexual tension.

Forming a Concept

By now a concept was starting to form. This poster needed to embody some sort of suggested narrative, as if the viewer has just stumbled into some mysterious scene that they don’t fully understand, but they are intrigued, and want to discover more.

Pulling from the film noir aesthetic, I knew I would be working with simple high contrast graphical forms. The poster had to suggest some sort of narrative, be a little dark, mysterious, sexy, sultry, and the composition needed to graphically twist the users head into a state of tension, just waiting to be released… much like Portishead’s music.

While most of my research had been dealing with purely black and white imagery, which was beautifully stark and to the point, this is 2008, and the poster would undoubtedly be competing for viewers’ attention against the cacophony of other ads that consume every available surface of New York City. My solution was to follow in the footsteps of Graphic Novel artist Frank Miller (and Saul Bass before him), who often introduces one bright color into otherwise graphic black and white compositions, keeping things stark, yet eye catching.

I started realizing my ideas by roughly sketching out a few compositions with pencil and paper, being careful that each design embodied the criteria that I had established through my research. I came up with four concepts that I would discuss with the client before moving forward.

The client was most intrigued by the silhouette concept, the hand holding the cigarette, and the open door, and I agreed that the lamppost concept lacked this sexy/sultry quality that we were looking for, and was not as intrinsically mysterious as the other concepts. So I began to refine the three chosen directions, again remembering to keep things graphical, stark, high contrast, and limit my pallet to graysacle plus one other color. I brought the three concepts back to client in a more evolved state.

Concept 1: I went for a bit of a lo-fi quality on this one as a node to the subtle tape noises and slight distortion filters that Portishead often uses in their music. The band’s name was moved out from silhouette so that it could quickly and easily be identified. The one spot of red was added to the lower left to make the composition pop, and balance out the band’s name. The entire form of the woman was shifted slightly left of the center of the composition and all of the type was set at slightly canted angles, both in an attempt to add more tension to the whole design, and follow the rule-breaking and organic characteristics of smoke that first inspired me. I opted for a slightly swooshy handwritten typeface as both a response to some of the characteristics of smoke that I reflected on earlier, as well as providing a “hand written note” quality that hopefully added more mystery to the design

Concept 2: For this one, I took a more simple Saul Bass style approach. I again played with a slightly offset placement of elements to add tension to the design. If this design was to be pushed forward, I would have explored sans-serif typefaces from 1940s and cut them by hand as a nod to the era of film that was inspiring the aesthetic, and playing with the idea of blending the old with new, which is very present in Portishead’s music as they put a modern twist on classic jazz and blues progressions.

Concept 3: This concept ended up taking a slight departure from the initial sketch because working the copy into the smoke was resulting in legibility issues with too many forms competing with each other. I added some lips trying to keep things sexy, however at this stage in this concepts development, the mystery was there, but it felt more sleazy than sexy or sultry. Also with so much going, we were starting to move away form the stark simplicity that made the film noir aesthetic so successful.

Final Refinements

The client ultimately choose the silhouette concept as the favored direction, and I also felt that it embodied pretty much everything hat we had set out to achieve. It suggested some sort of a narrative, it was stark, mysterious, eye catching, and legible. My issue with the design was the lack of the sexy and sultry quality that is very present in Portishead’s music. The silhouette felt too matronly… more like a 1940s housewife than a sexy woman walking through the shadows of a smoky lounge.

As a final step, I re-illustrated the silhouette in response to my hope for a sexier form. Rather than staying with the red dot, which worked graphically but felt a little arbitrary, I opted for the lips from one of the earlier concepts. The new profile required moving the red lips to the right side of the composition to balance everything out correctly, but breaking the edge of the composition held that level of tension that I was after.

For the final details, I went through altered repeated letters in the handwriting font to make it feel more like handwriting, and less like a font. Check out the final design: