Event Postcards - Thumbnails

Our next assignment was to prepare a design for a two-sided postcard advertising an event on campus. The designs needed to be 6" x 4.5", and use only two colors. This seemed at first like a fairly easy assignment, but in reality it ended up being pretty time consuming.

So, back to square one - thumbnails. I wracked my head to come up with event on campus that would conducive to multiple designs. I decided to go with Cesar Chavez Day and the Carolina Chocolate Drop concert. Both of these event had numerous images associated with them and I lfelt confident in my ability to prepare successful design for them.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. For some reason I struggled with the thumbnails again. Was I in a creative rut or something? I had had trouble coming up with thumbnails for the KT Week t-shirts as well. Eventually I was able to put down some thoughts, but I still felt that I didn't have any developed concept ideas.

The first event I worked with was the Cesar Chavez celebration. Chavez was a Mexican-American who worked for farm laborers rights throughout the 1900s. He was famous for his non-violent tactics, and especially for his fasting. During one of the most famous disputes Chavez organized a strike of the grape-pickers in California because the pesticide used on the vines was detrimental to the health of the workers. During this Chavez fasted for thirty some days as a sign of solidarity with the workers. I thought about this story when planning out my designs. I used the themes of grapes, unions, and a little with imagery of a lily, which has become associated with Chavez. After talking it over with Adrienne, I decided to work with the design of Chavez looking out over the farm workers. I thought that this would be a good front image for the postcard, and that for the back I could put some watermarked grape bunches behind the event information.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops were even more challenging in some ways. The Drops are an African-American string band who, through community conversations, are going to play a free concert here at Maryville on April 17th. This is going to be a big deal, considering that we've already had calls asking how much tickets are going to be. As far as the thumbnails went though, I wanted to keep them rather simple, which fit with the overall persona of the band. One of their CDs had an interesting logo on the front using a silhouette of an old fashioned whiskey jug. I thought it would be interesting if I could work with the image to put the logo on an image of a real jug. The other idea was to have just the faces of the band members on the front, in a sort of stylized relief. I thought that this would catch a viewer's eye, and make them flip the card to see what it was about.

So I took these three concepts and began working towards producing roughs.