Following up on my previous work for the Hype Machine, I was asked to create a piece of work representing the Canadian supergroup, The New Pornographers. I felt it critical to avoid the obvious connotations of the name so I created a piece of lettering whose aesthetic paid homage to the Rat Pack, the Vegas of days-gone-by, cocktail lounges and luxury.
The final piece
The Process
There were a couple of concepts that I considered for this piece: London tart cards (the postcards left by escorts in London phone booths), Times Square in the 1970s, and cheap ads found in the back of seedy men's magazines.
Times Square in the 1970s
Tart cards
Sleazy classified ads
While sketching out possible layouts, it struck me these concepts and any variation on them were far too obvious. As such, I quickly wrote out a list of adjectives corresponding to my concepts and then tried to think of antonyms.
Classy, modern, and art house stuck out as keywords (classy appeared twice somehow). With these in mind, I then sketched out a couple of layouts before settling on the final piece.
