“Jump, Jive And Wail”
2018 New Year’s Eve Posters
New Year’s Eve has always one of the biggest days for business at Spirit Mountain Casino, so at the tail end of 2017 my clients at that location asked me to develop a promotional poster for a party event they were planning for the big night. It would be themed around 1940s-style swing music, with a big band performing for guests, and they even attached a name to it that drew from a hit song that was eventually made famous for modern audiences by the Brian Setzer Orchestra.
To capture the look of the swing era, I studied posters used to promote big band and jazz artists during that time, and I found that many of them followed some simple rules that were easy to apply to my piece: They used posterized images with minimal details and a limited color palette featuring only two or three hues. These posters also used almost no gradations or color fades at all. I also made sure to study the fashions of the time, and I gave the people in my poster a wardrobe that would be consistent with the formal attire worn by men and women who appeared in the advertising and promotional art of that time.
My finished poster design received the hearty approval of my clients, but before long they came back to me with some news: They had changed their minds about the party theme, and now they wanted to try something different. Their new idea was to stage a New Year’s Eve event with a 1950s theme, and showcase music that was less swing and more rockabilly. Could I give them a new poster with a visual approach that reflected this style instead?
I always want my clients to be happy — and as it turned out, changing my initial poster to reflect a different era wasn’t too difficult. I re-did the images of the people to match the clothing styles of the 1950s, but I was able to keep the basic layout of the original poster while still reflecting the new era. I followed most of the visual rules I’d set for the 1940s-style poster (limited color palette, no gradations) while also adding some style effects like heavy black outlines and ben-day dots in the background color to evoke an image that would have more in common with Pop Art and the Baby Boom than with the visuals of the World War II generation.
Both poster designs were initially sketched out by myself with pencil, then scanned into a computer where I used Adobe Illustrator to render the final image as well as to add the copy and develop the typography used in the title event’s logo designs.
