Decabet

Being a compendium of things I made and things I wish I made, noted accordingly throughout.

[decabet]

Uh dang. Did we just Sell Out? Full disclosure: I was late to the Foo Fighters party. I was of course a huge Nirvana fan back in the day and loved the 1995 debut, but your tastes shift as you get older and you follow where they go. For that reason I kinda just lost …

[decabet]

[decabet]

#metallica #gigposter #philadelphia #decabet

[decabet]

Here is a case study I put together in great detail about my process connecting, developing, designing, and illustrating the album cover for Life in 24 Frames' album CTRL+Z. It's a pretty thorough read of a mammoth undertaking that took half a year to bring to completion. Enjoy!

[decabet]

#fucktrump #impeachtrump #istandwithpp #notmypresident #trump

[decabet]

A blog post I wrote this week about how my design style and sense of type were informed from a very early age by the packaging aesthetic of the band R.E.M.

[decabet]

With Oxford band Foals finally playing my hometown, it was incredibly important to me that I get this one right. As a major fan from day one, I needed to create a striking image that fit and repesented the band and their sensibility well. The cobra arm imagery was inspired by a book I saw about 15 years ago that featured public health/PSA adverts, flyers and posters from the 60’s and 70’s. One of the posters featured a horrific illustration of the effects of taking LSD: a young boy staring in horror at his upturned arms which had taken the form of snakes. I wanted surreal, narcotic imagery with an almost religious “stigmata” bent to it as well. This will be my first screen-printed poster since 2005’s Mos Def/Talib Kweli poster. Available in a signed, numbered edition of 50.

[decabet]

The Walkmen are one of my favorite bands. So for this poster for their show at the Granada Theater in Dallas I tried to conjure up a bit of that smokey, Weimar Republic cabaret feel that I get from their music. Whether I succeeded is debatable but the band seemed to like them. Available as a handsomely-printed 11×17 full-color print on heavy stock.

[decabet]

Dan Webb, a singer-songwriter from Australia, contacted me in winter 2011/12 to create a poster for a mini-tour he was doing in New Zealand. This one was a lot of fun as I was able to employ a lot of early 80s new wave airbrush flourishes and some nice hard geometry, fresh-colors, etc. Available as a handsomely-printed 11×17 full-color print on heavy stock.

[decabet]

For Mazzy Star‘s spring 2012 show in Sacramento, I wanted something that felt simultaneously rustic, mystic and a bit naive. I aimed for a color palate that was dark without feeling cold and accented it with more luminous colors. Available as a handsomely-printed 11×17 full-color print on heavy stock.

[decabet]

[decabet]

A poster for English band Friendly Fires show at the Granada Theater in Dallas, October 2011. First and foremost, I wanted to start and stay with a bright color palette to mirror the light, almost tropical sounds of their newest album Pala. This is also how I ended up incorporating feathers into the final piece ala the album’s cover. Very 70’s sci-fi and weightless and breathless. The tone and the textures I used are a reference to Rene Laloux’s ultra-bizarro 1973 sci-fi flick Fantastic Planet which, if you have not yet seen, I suggest you remedy that.

[decabet]

The first poster I ever made for the Granada Theater in Dallas was for the “dream bill” (to me anyway) of Cut Copy, Foals, The Naked and Famous, and Holy Ghost!. My initial concept was to riff on the famous Polish poster for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, long one of my favorite pieces of bold graphic design. A rare case of a poster making me want to see a film straight off. I remember seeing it in a collection of 70s movie posters in the late 90s and thinking “I have to see whatever this is” and frankly I think loving that poster design so much helped me to have more patience with the (very deliberately paced, to say the least) film. So the original plan was to make this one a very minimal homage to that design, but things never really quite end up the same as they start.

[decabet]

For Cold War Kids 2010 Sacramento show, I wanted to both play off their name and play with an idea I’d been toying with for a while: a distressed “wall of type.” I scoured the internet for help to properly render the gig’s information into several different languages, which is easier than it sounds. Rather than just run each through Google Translate, I wanted them to each be syntactically correct and housed individually in their own specific styles, the final effect (hopefully) being that of years of wheatpasted posters built up and torn down on an alley wall in East Berlin. This one was a lot of fun to put together.

[decabet]

More than any other, I think this poster I did in 2005 for the reunited Digable Planets is the beginning of my style starting to actually become something recognizable of its own. Before that, I’d done a bunch of posters, some good, some not so good, but this was where my voice started to present itself a bit more. Still one of my favorites nearly a decade later.

[decabet]

To date, my most ripped-off poster. Maybe it’s something about the universality of the headphone imagery, maybe its to do with how easy it is to clear out the top and load your own info and logos in, since its all white. Probably a little bit of both, but I’ve seen this one a number of times online, photoshopped and repurposed with new info. I even had one handed to me at Coachella. Too funny.

[decabet]