In honour of the hail today, I’m posting a recent poster I did for the North Shore Chorus’ spring concert! They wanted something with riotous spring colour, but rather than go a literal route of flowers I found this gorgeous painting to use as a background. I hope the cherry blossoms that have been peeking out this week survive today’s weather!
I’m so excited to be able to share the project I’ve been working on this January! Local Vancouver band, The Argyle Embargo, released their first album last night, and took me on to do the CD and jacket design. It was one of those lightning fast projects, where I had to collaborate with the band and the photographer to get everything done in time for the release, and we all pulled together to make something awesome. I’m so happy with the experience and the final product!
They also had me do a campaign of social media images to promote the album and the show. I love the challenge of translating a look and feel across different dimensions and platforms. Here are the ones I did for Facebook, Soundcloud, and Twitter.
A huge congratulations to the Embargo on a packed show and a rocking first album! Looking forward to the next one!
For their 2016 fall and winter concerts, I created a unified theme for the Pacific Spirit Choir posters. Using different kinds of stock images, I kept a consistent look with the large rectangular panels, and bold colour gradients. Each poster had to be re-interpreted as a bookmark as well, adapting the elements of the larger image to a smaller, narrower area while retaining the legibility and feel of the original. I’m looking forward to taking this same style into their spring concert poster for a fully cohesive 2016/17 season!
OMG! I’m so stoked to the 2016 graphic design campaign for Cor Flammae! Preparations for this Summer’s concerts are heating up, and now that repertoire selection and auditions are done it’s fundraiser time! The initial web graphics for our annual shindig are out in the world, along with the revamped and sexy sponsorship packages.
[You may noticed we’ve bid Dandycat a fond adieu, and welcomed this suave and sophisticated unicorn as our ambassador of FUNdraising. Join us on Tuesday, April 19th at XYYVR (1216 Bute St) to party like a unicorn! Tickets available here! Get them for cheaper if you buy them in advance! Find out more on Facebook.]
That got me thinking that I’m not sure if I’ve made a comprehensive list of my Cor Flammae design projects anywhere. Here’s what I’m doing this year:
The fun additions this year, include the initial conductor interview (which I filmed on my DSLR) and more graphics for the online campaigns – making images specifically for Instagram and Universe, in addition to the pieces for Facebook, YouTube and Bandcamp that we did last year. It’s wonderful to be able to broaden my skills by rounding out the campaign. I think this year’s campaign is forming into something clean, articulate and visually lush while still being fun – thanks in a large part to the great photos we have of previous years (which is another kind of satisfying). I can’t wait to get my hands on this year’s choir photo – styled by the amazing Missy Clarkson and Adam Dickson – and take off with this year’s concert materials!
I’m pleased as punch and super proud of my pal, Kristopher Fulton, who has just released his first album of choral works, The Twilight Cities. It’s a beautiful and evocative collection of pieces – the kind that make you feel like you’re actually inside a movie. The music is performed by the Vancouver Cantata Singers, under the direction of Paula Kremer.
Kris asked me to be a second set of hands on the liner notes, so I had the great privilege of doing the layout, as well as the text-setting on the cover. The brilliant cover image, “One City, One Spark” is by photographer Brandon Kidwell. While I merely added a light touch to this project, it is still a total thrill to see something I had a small part in staring up at me from my iTunes.
To check out the album, visit music.kristopherfulton.com, where you can preview all the songs (and then buy them)! The album is available on iTunes and Bandcamp!
I’m so excited to be working on the Cor Flammae 2015 marketing materials! Using this year’s lovely image photographed by belle ancell and designed by Adam Dickson and Missy Clarkson, I’ve created YouTube, Facebook and flyer images utilizing a consistent look and feel across these different mediums, and made dark and light versions with a related aesthetic. I’m looking forward to getting the poster out in June!
The YouTube, Facebook event and flyer graphics for the 2015 Cor Flammae summer season.
Last year I had the immensely rewarding and transformative experience of helping bring a new ensemble to life, as part of the Cor Flammae administrative team. If you haven’t seen my previous posts, Cor Flammae is a classical music choral ensemble aiming to celebrate queer composers and vocalists – the only one of it’s kind in Canada – and I’m happy to report we completed it’s inaugural concert to a hungry and excited audience. We sold out 250 seats, and had to turn away another 100. There were even scalpers, which pretty much never happens in classical music.
I have been a life-long choral music audience member, with an ever growing interest in the world of arts admin, and a fascination with the puzzle of how to generate the positive feedback loop of audience engagement and participation that makes a stable arts venture. It was with great delight that I lent my abilities with a keyboard and a pencil to the Cor Flammae effort, jumping into the tasks of fundraising and print design. Audition posters, fundraising graphics, thank you cards and concert posters were all fun ways to engage and hopefully inspire folks to be singers, patrons and philanthropists for this brand spanking new choral group. Working on the branding vision with the choir’s Managing Director (my lovely and multi-talented wife) Missy Clarkson, we wanted something clean and modern, that would both reflect the seriousness of the talent and the music involved in the project, as well as create a fresh and contemporary appeal. Inviting people into this project, whether they were classical music people or totally new to the world of choir, is a core value for us – this project has purpose and something to say, new art to make, and we want to share an angle that hasn’t yet had much real-time application (though there is quite a bit of interesting scholarship on queer musicology – Queering the Pitch is a fascinating read) with anyone who would be interested. This also lead me to my favourite part of the project, the programme.
I’ve designed programmes before, but the great joy of the Cor Flammae programme was the copywriting I did in addition to layout. Researching the amazing composers, building off the bios Missy had compiled on the website, and trying to synthesize something we could share with the audience about their contexts, music and personal stories that would illuminate the concert experience was both an incredible deepening of my own knowledge, as well as a chance to geek-out as a writer and flex my academic training.
It was a wonderful experience, and now we’re looking forward to creating the same magic for the summer of 2015. Performances are on July 17th and 18th, when we’ll be performing an incendiary concert of sacred and profane works by queer composers. Come check us out!
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