Expressing diversity of opinion efficiently

“Texas Votes” was the second project I worked on for the Headcount organiztion. Their mission is to GOTV with registration booths and swag at concerts, shows, and other musical events for young people.

In the final weeks of the 2020 election, I burnt the midnight (and 1am. And 2am…) oil writing, designing, illustrating and even animating a short-form music video for them called “Time to Vote” featuring the band Lawrence (read more about that here).

As demographics have shifted over time, every election cycle sees Texas moving closer to much-desired “swing state” status. I wanted a quick, simple, and most importantly graphic way to express this. Clearly, and with little nuance to cloud things. This would of course be a non-partisan graphic but I used multiple typefaces and a blue-to-red gradient fill to express the power in numbers we can often (understandbaly) forget that we possess. And that goes for both sides of the political fence.  

To put it into motion it needed to hit, make its point, drop a CTA and be gone in under 5 seconds. Almost like an act of visual punctuation…

2020.

Few years in history can be guaranteed to check the person hearing it with an instant, bracing feeling like 2020. In fact I even worked on a campaign about proper disposal of batteries that leveraged 2020 (and the popular notion of the “dumpster fire” ) and all that with great success just a couple years ago. 2020 had its issues, to say the least. 

“… a crucial time.”  

One of the fun things (of many) about desinging for the music industry is the mix of people you get to meet and work with.  Dallas / Fort Worth Headcount Team Leader Chris McDonald and I go way back, having met on the Coachella mesage board back when message boards were still a thing. Eventually he became a booker at Dallas’ Granada Theater which led to him tapping me to make posters for bands like Foals and Cut Copy over the years. With a crucial presidential election coming up in fall of 2020, I reached out with an idea I had: what if we found a band with a following but who hasnt quite blown up yet and got them to do a song about all the different ways one could vote that year. With the pandemic still in full swing, reching out in a fun way to young people about absentee ballots seemed like a fun project and (if nothing else) a great antidote to the cabin fever we’d all been experiencing for months. So Chris found up and coming band (though one might say they have since arrived) Lawrence to pen something that met the moment. They wrote and recorded “time to vote” and we were off to the races. I burrowwed into my affectation for the retro vibes of Milton Glaser and Schoolhouse Rock and in just an hour or two shy of two weeks had written, designed, illustrated, animated, and edited the video you are about to see…

Behavior change doesn’t have to feel like a chore

Waste disposal and the proper sorting of it. Organics, recyclables, hazzardous and bulky waste. There are so many rules that its natural that option fatigue would make someone throw their hands up at it all. And while proper waste disposal is certainly an inevitable responsiibility, there’s no reason it needs to feel like the chore that it is. On top of this, a good habit is one you start early on. I remember as a kid, Captain Planet having a pretty pronounced effect on my generation. Maybe there was a way to put some of that fresh energy to use for Sacramento’s SacGreenTeam, an arm of Sacramento County’s waste disposal service aimed at promoting sensible environmental stewardship at the household level. 

Meet the “Bin fluencers”  

Yeah, its a goofy pun, but I wanted something with a little “bounce” to it since I’d be designing the characters in an almost primary color, school workbook vibe in the best tradition of far better illustrators like Milton Glaser. The Binfluencers would be color-coded to their specific type of waste and be drawn as simple vector illustrations in extreme, towering perspective and funky, bold proportions. And each would be so proud of their positive behavior they pulled out their phones to record the moment.

The other great thing about this approach is that Lottie animations for web were fast becoming a way to deliver high quality, infinitely-scalable animations across a number of channels and device types. The Binfluencers were made for this moment. And they exist everywhere from various social channels (where we saw engagement far beyond what you’d normally expect for a sanitation service) to the Recycle Reboot website where we offered practical tips for conscientious waste reduction and disposal to more commonplace assets like home mailers and fun swag like stickers and coloring pages for kids to help keep them engaged with proper waste handling. 

And using the fun visual language of color-coded illustrations made them universal in a way that really helped when translating their message across the myriad languages present in the Sacramento area. From Spanish to Tagalog, these simple characters reached across cultural differences and really reached people. We used local language translation and education service Language World to help make these characters resonate with an international flavor…

The above scenes were animated by Sacramento’s Noble Creative Collective, who also valiantly handled post on the full spot, seen below…

In fact, they really added something to even the most utilitarian spots on municipal waste and I think that spark of life is really what helped move the needle in some pretty substantial ways for the client.

Resulting in…

Defining and refining the brand

I did the poster design and some social and motion assets for 2022’s Same Same But Different festival in Southern California on Lake Perris (you can see my work from that year here) and the promoters liked the work so much they asked me to return for the 2023 fest, but this time in an expanded role. A common factor with most music festivals is how they often start off with a less disciplined brand system, usually defined and then refined after the fest has had a few years to get up and running. During those first few years there can be a few too many variations in color, type, texture, etc. present and SSBD wanted the 2023 iteration of the event to have a more structured brand system and they wanted me to be part of creating that look.

The industry comes roaring back

In winter 2019/20 I was working on art for several music festivals (nearly all festivals are planned several months in advance as they end up impacting many artists’ touring plans for the years they occur in. Of course then (motions around) things changed. Spring dates shifted optimistically to early summer, then late summer, then autumn before being ultimately shelved. A trend that would stick around for a year or two. Since Covid first hit in 2020 there have been multiple false starts and plans that never made it past the initial planning stages. 2023 felt like things were finally geting back to normal. That year I would do four music festivals just in the first four months of the year.

I was thrilled when Activated Events asked me to help them rebrand their long-running Coastal Country Jam festival, which would be returning in 2023 but in a very different location than its original stomping grounds in Huntington Beach. The festival was moving north. To Long Beach. And that change of venue was going to inform the artwork.

Avoiding the usual “country/western” tropes

Sure, this was a country music festival but it was also a California country music festival. On the beach no less. The look would need to avoid all the usual trappings associated with country music. No boots, for instance. And it should at least nod to the California model of country. A bit more Eagles than Charlie Daniels Band. I set to work on a few different brand marks to see about presenting this specific vibe. And as I often do, I would start with color. What could bridge the gap in vibe here? Sand, sea, earth tones and honky tonks. All that. I put together a simple palette as my jumping off point. 

Color and type are often my way “in” on a project. Each carries its own language and tone into things that help light the path toward what the other elements will be. So next I’dd find some type that could live in that space between Country tradition and California attitude. I would mock up a couple basic logotypes.

California State Fair Poster 2017: The Concept

2017 marked the California State Fair’s 50th year at Sacramento’s Cal Expo fairgrounds since moving there from inside the city proper in 1968. To mark the occasion, my then-fiancé-now-wife (UnCommon‘s Amber Witzke, who has worked as Art Director and designer on CSF branding the past several years) suggested we make a limited edition poster in the style of Disneyland’s classic attraction posters, specifically an homage to their classic and iconic Monorail poster.

Cal Expo has its own monorail (if a bit less sleek and “jet age” as the ones in Anaheim and Orlando) and what’s more its also been the site of Disney’s California Adventure’s transplanted “CALIFORNIA” entrance letters since 2013. We could use these connections to create something really exciting and special as a souvenir to promote the anniversary.