The Hell Cometh
My latest rock poster design is for the upcoming Wolf Tickets CD Release Party at the Mohawk Place on Friday, Sept. 25th, 2009. I was pleased as to how this one came out, so I thought I would write about the process of creating it.
This design was based on the CD artwork which I developed earlier in the Summer. The CD art will see the first light of day (or should I say, dark of the inside of the 'Hawk) the Friday of the show. All the stuff I have done for head-Wolfer Chris Malachowski have 2 things in common: stars and the color red. It just always seem to fit what I do for the band.
The CD title is Here Come The Hell and I played around with creating a title graphic for some time for this project starting with the CD. I tried to find a font that was punky and sans serif. I use serif-less fonts often in rock posters, often relying on the Futura family (love that Extra Black!). From a distance, I think they are more readable.
I couldn't find a font I wanted to use for this and I was getting tired of manipulating the typeface in photoshop- so I decided to go old school. I pulled out some old decrepit
Lettreset Presstype (
Helvetica Medium) and started to hand-set (
or rub, I should say) the album's title. The sheets were old, crackly and the letters didn't stick very well- but I loved it!! I overlapped a few characters which a second burnish to cover pieces that fell off after not sticking. Kerning characters by eye, as well as lining up/overlapping them manually created the offset to the characters that I was looking for. Once I was happy with this built up art, I scanned it into Photoshop and adjusted the levels so the background became white and the characters
solidified tonally. Also I filled in some of the missing pieces to hold together the integrity (
ever so slightly) of the letter forms. I made a 600 dpi bitmap TIF file and dropped it into my cover image on the CD of the tanks. It was reused on this poster design. And there you have it-
by hand, punk rock!The use of P22 Typewriter font was exactly what WT requested. This typewriter-themed font style has become popular with punk rock designers for ages so it fit the bill. It also has a hint of a quasi-military feel-- M.A.S.H. did the same thing for Stencil fonts. When I stared to add elements and text to the piece I decided to make the CD title art huge
(it is proportioned about 400% larger that on the CD cover) to draw attention to this catchy name
'Here Comes The Hell' (
no exclamation point needed). So if you can imagine this full size (
see link at bottom), you can read the title from 15 - 18 ft. away. I added a few more stars to keep with the WT brand and decided to give the whole thing a
rougher look by framing the large, manipulated, color-tweaked photo in a sharp-edged frame giving it the
'viewed through a broken window pane' aesthetic.
I took a few extra steps to further distress a couple elements. I upped the font size of a few characters and added a bolder stroke to others. Some of the letters moved up a hair and a few down a hair creating some motion, some uneasiness and a bit (
ever so slight) of drama. The main manipulated image borrowed was a square photo so I had to do something to fit it in the 11 x 17" format. By simply copying a chunk of the top of the photo, flipping it and pulling it out like taffy, I was able to fill the space with a ghostly shadow which almost looks like smoke. If you notice above the 's' in 'comes' there is a repeat of the tank antenna. I didn't bother to stamp it out as it looked natural as part of the background behind the large title. Happy accidents, eh?
There you have it.
Click here for a large PDF (4.2 MB) of the the poster or go authentic punk: go to the show and tear a poster from the wall of the 'Hawk as a souvenir. That is the greatest compliment to any poster designer.
Oi! See ya on Sept. 25th at the Mohawk!!BONUS BEATS: Wolf Tickets on MySpace (hear 'em!).
