Scott Bush

My wife is participating in the breast cancer 3-Day walk
in Sept. Part of that commitment includes a $2,200 donation for which she’s been fundraising. She and her team, the Wonder Women, are hosting an evening event they’re calling “‘Tinis for Ta-Tas” (that’s “martinis” for breasts—get it?! Har har har…). July 9 should be a very fun evening at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, thanks in part Ruby Shuz, our friend’s band for generously donating their musical services and magician Joseph Réohm for agreeing to perform close-up walk-around magic. So we’ll see you there at 7, okay?!

I agreed to help by designing the event poster that is being posted around Ballard as I write, and will appear on college campuses and other places next week. It’s been a while since I designed a visual document like this so I wanted to share it.

A striking image of a woman with a martini at a party is the basis of the poster (see the full poster here). I ran across it on iStockPhoto while browsing for images with “martini” keywords (and trust me, there are lots). I saw it and thought “perfect!” My Illustrator chops aren’t very good so creating something from scratch would have been very difficult; heck, even modifying any vector image would have tricky, and I didn’t have a lot of time. This image pretty much fit the bill completely.

Using it as the hook upon which to hang the other elements, I dove in. The poster had to include five elements:

1. Title
2. Date and time
3. Location
4. Music and magician
5. Purpose

First, I filled in the bottom portion of the letter-sized page with the same dark burgundy color and decided to reverse all my type (meaning it appears white rather than black). The font is Neutraface Display and Neutraface Text, two excellent OpenType families that have a lot of weights and variation. I didn’t want the bottom to be too information-heavy so I started with the bar across the top of the poster to balance out the bottom. The three items in that list (”Fight breast cancer,” “Have a martini,” and “Rock out!”) pretty much sum up the event.

Next came the title. The image’s composition was perfect for the three-word phrase “‘Tinis for Ta-Tas,” allowing me to position the words in relation to the martini and, er… ta-tas in the image. Perfect. I had a couple of additional visual elements with the Ruby Shuz CD cover and Joe’s image. I played around with the sizing before ending up with the CD cover taking precedence; that is what most people would be interested in, after all.

After some fiddling, I realized the time, date, and location would be lost if they weren’t given prominence. That’s when I divided up the bottom portion into two sections, with information on either side aligned to a thin rule. Neutraface Display’s “titling” weight worked perfectly for the date, and different weights of that font filled out the remaining info: time, day, and location. The Tractor’s icon—<gasp>a tractor!—added another visual element to balance those on the other side.

The two remaining pieces of information, the cover charge and the benefits to Susan G. Koman needed to be included. Adding both to the bottom was too much, so I used a circular callout to display the cover charge and the included martini. The cover charge is very prominent, but I hope the free martini note is also apparent to the viewer due to its proximity to the large $15. The breast cancer pink ribbon and Susan G. Koman name wasn’t really coming together for me, so I decided to repeat a portion of the large image from above as a backdrop for it. It is a bit busy, but I think it works. I again used text on a path to explain what was in the circle… well, an oval in this case as a circle didn’t fit breasts background or suit the wide text-and-ribbon sitting upon it.

That’s the major work, but there were some minor tweaks: lots of spacing and leading (space between lines) adjustments, adding the rounded corners to images, etc. Those with sharp eyes will note the major issue with this piece: the burgundy in the image doesn’t exactly match the burgundy at the bottom and top. I don’t have a vector drawing program like Illustrator so had to rely on Photoshop’s import of the EPS file from iStockPhoto. For whatever reason, the CMYK values in InDesign didn’t create a like color, so I compensated visually. I know it was wrong, but I had to hurry.

Hope you enjoyed this not-so-little explanation of the piece and really hope you can come to the event at 7pm, Wednesday July 9 at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard!