About the project
2016 marks the sixth year I have worked with the Badass Mountain Music Festival. One of the challenges designing for the same festival year after year is coming up with fresh ideas. A secondary issue is coming up with a fresh idea that will work well regardless of whether it is a full-color poster design, or a one-color screen print (the music festival is a non-profit, so keeping production costs low is an ever-present concern).
This was the first year I took something of a “mobile-first” approach to designing the festival graphics. Where I usually would begin designing the poster as the first element in the system, I instead began with the more restrictive, one-color shirt design. The result is a line-work heavy illustration utilizing trendy monoline design and colors.
Here you can see the initial monoline design. It translated beautifully to a screen printed graphic, with the crosshatch lines adding texture and dimension.
FINISHED FESTIVAL SHIRT
FESTIVAL POSTER
Here you can see the illustration formatted for a full-color poster. Although I wanted more color in the poster, I wanted to keep the design clean and focused. I limited the color palette to four colors and focused on bright, trendy colors like turquoise and magenta.
The compositional structure of the illustration provided a great container to organize the text objects within. The highest tier of the visual hierarchy flanks either side of the guitar neck, with secondary information finding a tidy home just outside of the illustration’s main margins.
