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Emerald City magazine ad - Grab Bag Media
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illustration

grab bag blog

This is where I talk about my work, my discoveries, my creative process, and the ins and outs of marketing in the arts.

Emerald City magazine ad

June 6, 2011

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freelance life
Emerald City Theatre TYA Magazine ad

I’ve decided to postpone my post on the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company brochure design which was to accompany my behindthescenes posts on the season design until I can get my hands on an actual printed copy of the season brochure, which should happen tomorrow or so. In the meantime, this just landed in my hands, so I thought I’d share.

One of the fun things about having a relationship with a theatre company or other client is how often they just drop work into your lap. Over the last year, I’ve worked with Emerald City Theatre Company doing some print design work for them as well as a web site clean-up design. Out of the blue, their artistic/executive/marketing director dropped me an email asking if I could put together a magazine ad for them with only a few days turn-around time. She included an ad she liked and asked if it could look like that. I, of course, politely ignored that request. Well, not ignored, as I did take a look at the ad she supplied. But I find it dangerous to be asked to imitate or draw inspiration from a single source because not only is that plagiarism, it’s also not fun for me as a creative person.

So in lieu of creating a ribbon of images down the side of the ad as in the sample ad, I eventually decided on the idea of building blocks to evoke the feel of children at play. I started with a photo of some blocks for reference, and then built all of it from scratch in Photoshop using photos of different wood grains and the show photos. The result looked pretty good, and looks especially nice when printed in the bright glossy pages of this month’s TYA Magazine. And by turning the job around in less than 36 hours, I made some nice bank and had a happy client. Win-win!

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