Austin City Limits

Services: Hand-lettering
Illustration & Design: Andy Gregg
Creative Direction: Joel Anderson

The Project

The organizers of this world-famous music festival commission a new poster each year to commemorate the event and to sell as merchandise. They hired us to create the 2012 Festival Poster Design. We included icons and landmarks that would encourage concert-goers to stay a bit longer and visit other parts of the city.

The Challenge

How do you depict a whole city along with all the fun things it has to offer? How do you make a fresh design for a music festival that happens every year? How do you create a poster that can also be the Festival logo, t-shirt, branding material, social media promo, and anything else needed to brand and promote the event?

The Solution

We hand-lettered the logo/masthead to be a fixture in the poster design, and also to stand alone as a branding element. Then we created a stylized city scene that depicted outdoor recreation, food, entertainment, city life, and of course, the music festival. The design was packed with detail and hidden gems, making it comprehensive, whimsical, and fun!

Concept Sketches

Staff artist Andy Gregg went wild with combining quirky, fun, stylized graphic elements. His rough sketches explored icons of Austin, including bats, architecture, music and outdoor fun. Eventually, we settled on a night scene of the skyline with the festival stage up front.

Color Rendering

We rendered the final poster in two formats: a big 24″ x 36″ horizontal screen print and a smaller 18″ x 24″ vertical offset print. The color palette was intentionally simple. It included metallic gold ink for the silkscreen poster which was sold as a limited edition print.