wuslam - THE GRAND SLAM ("enough said")

WOOHOO! The Grand Slam is only a week away, and I'm already pumped to go. This was one of the bigger projects that I got tasked with, because I had to make one main poster and 10 individual posters featuring all of the poets. I decided not to go with a hand-drawn feel and come up with something very graphic, simple, because my main goal was clarity, not necessarily style. 

(you have no idea how many struggles occurred, because my computer had crashed while I was working on this. as a result, I scrambled from computer to computer for the right fonts.)

some initial sketches. i was just playing with basic visual ideas, because i felt that it would be the best way to tie together ten different poets. 

went with a vertical rectangle piano keyboard looking thing. 

white had a nice visual effect but I liked the way the dark shapes on the poets sat against  the black. 

sketches for individual posters! 

wuslam - december slam ("button poetry is clearly the visual theme")

the last slam of the year! I didn't focus on a color scheme in general for this slam, and instead looked to really incorporate the button theme, because the host poets Sam Cook and Michael Lee are part of a group called Button Poetry. 

Everything was hand-drawn, and when I used Photoshop I used a crayon-wax brush in order to keep that sketchy/traditional feel. 

final version

initial sketches. I was exploring visually what I could do with the two poets. 

and then i stumbled upon the wonderful information that they were part of a group called "button poetry," so i went ahead to incorporate a button/circle visual theme into the poster. 

circles are always tricky though, so i spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with the layout. 

ended up settling on something close to that, just a little more compact. 

pencil sketch/lines; I wanted to keep a paper/traditional texture feel to the piece. 

here's a different color version. the blue's a little too teal and everything clashes too much, so i desaturated the colors, got rid of some of the shapes, and produced something much simpler. 

wuslam - november slam

Here's another poster for WUSlam. This one was done for the November Slam.

Went a little overboard with the "storm" theme, but it worked out. Done entirely in Photoshop. 

Some sketches/thumbnails! 

wuslam - october slam

WUSlam once again. This poster was done for the October Slam. I went a different route and drew it all by hand, instead of constructing everything entirely by presets.

some sketches/thumbnals: 

"wuslam likes whales" (september slam and whale icons)

(final version)

I was asked to design a poster for our school's poetry slam team, and it wasn't easy. I played around with a couple of ideas:

(as you can see, none of them really went anywhere.) (though looking back, I kind of like the third one.) 

definitely rolled with the blue one. 

some sketches of whales:

 the silhouettes!