Rush! Club Posters
Last week, for my Color Design class, our final project was to create a color palette and design three products using our palette. Starting off, we were assigned to create a moodboard of visuals that we could create the palette from, and most of the pictures I was driven to were risograph prints with overlapping pink and blue tints, which slightly reminded me of the album cover for Troye Sivan’s Rush remix. This inspired me to create a color palette that was electrifying, almost like the feeling you get while dancing in the club and house of techno music is playing in the background.
Once I had my vivid color palette created, it was time to start designing three products using my palette. My mind immediately went to make an album cover since this was largely music-inspired, but the professor for this class also taught me for my Graphic Design class sophomore year, where we did have a project where we had to design album packaging. So after discussing some ideas back and forth, my professor told me that I should check out some old-school rave posters and make something similar.
From there, I started researching many of these archive posters but hit a wall. I didn't know how to define the style these posters followed. In fact, there isn’t really a style to them, it’s just an absolute pandemonium of visuals, which honestly, as it should be - raves are pretty much the same thing. So after spiraling trying to find inspiration, I just open up illustrator and went in blindly.
I had actually just taken photos of a Brat-themed club night at Chelsea’s and knew I wanted to utilize these photos in my design. One of the main reasons I got into photography was so I could personalize my designs with my photography instead of using stock photos. (The last post in this carousel shows these initial designs that were more photo-based rather than illustration.)
However, I was struggling to get the look I wanted and make the photographs the primary element in these first drafts. So I went back to focusing on just illustrations since they would better convey the vibrant color palette I had created and allowed me more creative freedom. I was still able to utilize one of the photographs I took by creating an illustration out of it (the poster on the left) which turned out much more funky and playful rather than if I had just used the plain photo with a color overlay on it. I made the main center posters be an advertisement for a club night titled “Rush” because of course I had to pay tribute to the main inspiration that drove this whole project!
I also created the typography using the pen tool in Illustrator and just freehanded everything. This type was also inspired by a song, this time being from the music video for APT by Rosé and Bruno Mars. The spiky and sharp graphics were also loosely inspired by the motion graphics in the music video as well!
I had a blast working on this project and loved the creative freedom it allowed me to experiment with. This is definitely one of, if not the most visually interesting projects I’ve ever created, and you can check out the final product below!
