:TRANSMISSION: 3rd Year Anniversary @ Club Jäger

Holy change-of-pace, Batman! Here's something quite unexpected from me. Wacky alignments, for starters. Big type treatments. I pulled my aesthetic, momentarily, about 30-40 years back.

I'm not going to say I tire of the more modern, 1960s bauhaus approach, I just feel that after a while, people will start to think that's all I'm capable of (and I'm not). And I wanted to see if I could channel an entirely different era of design, while still putting my stamp all over it.

So, I get the message from Jake that Transmission's anniversary with Jager is coming up, and he threw out a few ideas, one of them being "having a big 3," and immediately I knew what I was going to do.

See, I never sketch thumbnails. Never ever ever. I've also never met a designer or teacher who implores you to do thumbnail sketches, because they speed up your process. Well bollocks to that. This is how I design:

1. Get a subject
2. Create the design in my head
3. Execute design in Adobe programs, generating ideas as I go.

I'm a fast worker, especially in InDesign, so I find thumbnail sketches, really, to be a waste of energy. Plus I can never be as precise as I want.

(I will admit that one time thumbnails did get me on track to a great design, but that was in school, and I was required to sketch)

Anyway, last week I was really digging early soviet designs, constructivism, and Bauhaus design. So, I was like yeah, I'm going to do this all angle-y and what-not. Big 3, since that was the main point, and then just playing with alignments, and throwing in some lines.

See HERE for my inspiration. It's a New Order sleeve, but it's ACTUALLY a design by Depero Fortunato, a big name in the Italian Futurism movement.

I made this poster in 20 minutes, because of a couple reasons:

1. That's how I work, and
2. I collect inspiration daily, so I didn't even have to go looking for any. It was there, and ready.

{Tip for designers: Always be curious, always be looking for inspiration. Nothing in this world is new, nothing is original. In order to be creative, you need to steal creatively. Learn about other eras, about the importance of certain design movements. Collect, collect, collect. I have a folder on my computer of more than 500 images, all designs that I've collected, just whatever catches my eye. You can't imagine how much they've helped me.

For more on how my collection process works, see HERE. }

Jake ended up finding a few more reasons why the poster worked for a night (apart from it being based on a New Order sleeve), which was that it was reminiscent of a few other bands that employed the similar style. He also correctly identified that it was 1920's/socialist/propaganda influenced.