During my year working as a graphic designer for the historic music venue 'First Avenue' in Minneapolis, I had the opportunity to create countless posters, videos, and social media content for all of their venues (First Avenue, 7th St Entry, the Palace Theater, the Fitzgerald Theater, Turf Club, Fine Line, Cabooze, and Amsterdam). Here are some of my favorite projects that came out of that experience.
posters
All posters are created differently at First Avenue; we work with the material that the performing artist sends us. Some artists send poster-sized photos that only need minor editing and copy, some send tiny pixelated pictures that need lots of workaround, and some send nothing at all, which allows me to create an illustrative or typographical poster for their gig.
For most posters, I was given 15–30 minutes to design the layout, edit the photo and add the copy. For the illustrated ones, I would have about 40 minutes. It was a fast-paced environment due to new concerts being announced, canceled and rescheduled daily.
Most of the pictures on posters need some size editing, I'd say at least about 80% of them do. The Junior Brown poster is a good example of what the average photo I received looked like (although the original photo was slightly larger than the one on the left). On this one, I added noise to the picture due to the pixelation, which would become very evident once it was printed on an 11x17 poster. After that, I extended his torso/legs/guitar cable, right arm, and hat. I edited it with shadows and cloned the texture in order to make it look as real as I could get in about 15 minutes.
videos
A big part of my work at First Ave was putting videos together for future presentations. Most of these videos were assembled by editing different sequences of short clips from the band, putting them together in a visually appealing sequence, editing and adding a song from the artist that would match the video, and placing the copy and text effect on top. I would have about 45 minutes to work on each video; they all would have to be 30s long in order to be exported into the venue's website.
All of my video work was made using After Effects and Photoshop.
