Fire Island Blog

One of the most interesting (and fun) early tasks as a designer for Fantasy Festivals is working on the ‘festival posters’.

For version 1 of the site (just going into beta now) all of the posters had to be created to work at relatively low resolution (900×600 at 72dpi) without too much noise or detail adding to the file size for download.

We wanted to create a few choices within each genre, so we were almost looking for design clichés to represent different musical tastes and there are some obviously punk, hip-hop, reggae etc examples that do just that in the beta version of the site.

However for version 2 of the site (in development now) the design shackles came off and our brief was to have fun, make beautiful images with quirky, interesting layouts and not worry about the resolution because they would be rendered in a funky new Adobe Flash format.

We were also after some more generic backgrounds, not specifically tied to any one musical taste.

So I had some fun with some of my old ‘texture’ photos, favourite colour palletes and some funky new Photoshop brushes I found on the web. You can check out some example designs on Flickr.

Through posting these images in my Flickr photostream, I got some feedback inviting comparison with both Gustav Klimt (who I was familiar with) and the Japanese Rimpa school of artists (who I’d never heard of), both of which are very flattering.

The Rimpa work was fascinating and I particulary like “Autumn Flowers and Moon” by Sakai Hoitsu which I will try to use as inspiration for the next set of designs, be interesting to see if my work is enhanced or intimidated by the comparisons.