Marketing materials created for artist Niko Moon for a Summer block party-branded outdoor event in South Dakota. I worked with promoter Pepper Entertainment to create some fast, visually interesting marketing.
The artist provided a beach photo and logo. Design turnaround time was extremely tight, with just a little over 24 hours until announcement.
Faced with this, I briefly caved into Creative Cloud AI pressure and attempted to compile a design with Adobe Firefly. In theory, you could upload assets, offer a creative prompt, and get an amazing design in seconds. I did get some designs in seconds, but I would not call them amazing. Generative AI still struggles with all types of text generation, so I was offered 3 designs covered with garbled AI gibberish. Most of the layouts were bizarre, with my provided image replaced with a super cartoony AI composition. Only one mockup offered creative potential. One Firefly design had the BLOCK PARTY text behind the artist’s head in a Rolling Stone magazine-style font.
I bailed on Firely and took my elements to Photoshop for a good old-fashioned magazine cover composition. There are lots of fonts that approximate the one used on Rolling Stones’ logo, I went with Royal Acid Bath.
Next, I let the season decide the color palette. Cool blue and bright yellow, said Summer, just fine.
The event included numerous sponsors and promoters, so finding places for these identities came next. I turned on the alignment of these elements in the header, sidebar, and footer areas, giving them each fair recognition.
The font changed into the more elegant Abril Fatface during approval variations. Otherwise, things moved fast, and materials were delivered ahead of time.
Finally, the event date, time, location, and ticket outlet are grouped and assigned a type hierarchy. These are collected in the poster footer, much like a magazine cover’s content feature listing.
Once approved, a print-ready poster is output along with standard social media sizes. Elements are also exported and added to a localized story video.
