despises conservative design.In addition to designing he is a father (with a whole creative bunch) and a professor at California College.
I was extremely excited to interview John. Pro-bono works are one of the best ways to see the true creativity of an artist. Posters are one of the most fun and interesting things to design. They lend themselves to innovation. With our congested, images saturated world, posters are a fun opportunity to communicate your message.
Project Background: Film Night in the Park is a public outdoor activity in the San Francisco area. John created the posters for 6 years.
Here are some of the posters he created:
Project Goal: The goal of the Fill Night in the Park posters is simple: to attract people to first read the poster, then to attend the show. Pro-bono projects often start out as a favor for friends, but more than that it gives the artist a chance to express their creative freedom and do something they really enjoy. John enjoys the chance to take a novel idea and mix up the design without limitations. Taking pro-bono work very seriously, John works to make a fresh portfolio piece. Although complete creative freedom is not the only way that John creates interesting works. He also stressed that limitations can be just a liberating (demonstrated by his entire portfolio). Restrictions and working with clients help him focus his creativity. Seeing what you can do with limitations. That is one of the reasons that he loves icon design. There is only so much you can do with them – making it more challenging to arrive at a creative solution.
Problem: Creative a design that will catch attention.
Ideas: John goes back and forth between paper and computer to generate ideas. If blocked in one medium he moves to the other. These posters are character based. For these posters he was inspired by pop culture and Japanese style. He also experimented with Typography to make his eye-catching appeal. The characters were sometimes tied conceptually to the films or the event. The octopus was inspired by one of the films that year where an octopus attacked the Golden Gate Bridge. He did an ant one year because of the idea that it is in a park with a lot of ants.
Client/Designer: John did get input from the client. Before John shows ideas to the client he normally always does computer versions of his ideas. He also normally creates the design, in its entirety, digitally. This is really interesting to me becasue it seems that many illustrators do a lot by hand then convert to digital. The client sometimes thought the posters were a bit crazy (intentionally) but trusted him. Sometimes he pushed his innovation a bit far and had to crank it back a few notches. For example, the posters were printed on translucent paper, so he tried putting the text backwards so you can only read it from the back of the sheet.
Solution: After the whole process, John made the final decision, and created the posters that made everyone stop to see what he has to say. John’s work is very inspirational. He can take any project and make it something so unique and interesting. I look forward to following his fresh style in the future.
10 comments:
Wow, those are some gorgeous illustrations. I would say that he solved the problem nicely.
It nice to look at art and immediately recognize it as great art born of thoughtful design and experimentation. Hersey's work is impressive in its creativity. I can definitely see the Japanese influence, in fact I thought they were Japanese posters from afar. I also noticed the type treatment. Even reversed or mirrored or deemphasized it works. The type becomes part of the art. I love what he says about limitations being liberating. A well developed truly interesting project presentation, thanks.
Nice work Liz...
My only comment would have been to increase the hierarchy of your paragraph bullet points (ie. Project Goal, Problem, Ideas, etc...)
Good stuff, Liz. Poster design is sort of a fundamental aspect of design, and these are some gorgeous posters. I like the one-eyed octopus.
Really awesome designs, I love the approach he takes with these posters, definitely something new and unique we haven't seen. Ha, I love your bolded and huge text, really emphasizes how he must he really despises conservative design, nice to see someone really passionate about their concepts. Great job!
hey Liz! thanks for introducing me to this guy! I absolutely love his work. This was a really cool project too. You presented it with such enthusiasm that I think it made me like his work that much more!
Wow nice posters! I love them; my favored has to be the squirrel.
I can only agree with him, it’s all about limitations in your designs. Even when you work on a project just for yourself and you can do whatever it is you want to do; it becomes a problem because of all the freedom. Therefore shortly after you realized that you have to much freedom you start to set boundaries for yourself, and even its only the color pallet or the layout ect..
Keep Spooning !
It was encouraging to hear that Hersey's planning process involves moving back and forth between pencil and computer. I work similarly to this and it's good to know that I'm not doing it wrong! Very interesting piece, I love his illustration style and the posters he created definitely fulfilled their job to be eye catching and attract attention to the event. Good job!
If I lived in the Bay Area I would anticipate the revealing of the new poster every year.
Hersey definitely applies a deliberate process in the creation of these. It is evident in the successful finished products.
it's really nice that you got in touch of this guy, the illustration of his is definitely now one of my favorite, fun pieces, definitely caught my attention :) !
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