Days Of the Doomed Fest poster

Days Of the Doomed Fest

This was a tough project and the cause of the "toughness" was myself. I had a cool image and thought that would be enough for a poster but I should know better by now: a poster or image needs a hook and a couple of cool ideas working for it to really stand out. I got pretty far into the project and realized this. It happens from time to time and makes me realize everytime that the key is in the sketch and idea.



The main focal point of the poster (the skulls) go back to a CD packaging project I was working on for a friend last year. I would work on it when I had a free moment and some time passed when I learned the project was shelved for now so I decided to use the skulls for something else. Cut to begin working on the poster for the Days of the Doomed Fest and starting with the Skulls again. I fused two seperate pieces together, the face of the skulls and the horns and positioned them on the poster 2/3 of the way up thinking this was "it", 4 skulls facing inward making a square, cool right? It needed a clever way to work in the name of the festival, a nice place to put the band names and it needed all of this to work together. I like posters where the name of the band or event is part of the design, not an afterthought.



I decided to start working on the layout in Photoshop to see it with the Skulls themselves, after a bit I came up with something I thought would work.



I drew out the name of the fest and the border as smoke and figured the bands would be floating in the smoke...



After awhile I realized the names would be floating in or on the smoke/flame stuff and this didn't sit well with me. I wanted to typset the names in case they change soon and since this is a doom event and not a stoner-rock one I figured any swirlying smokey gooey flamy fonts wouldnt work with the vibe. The font had to be minimal, typset and dark/heavy.



I used the Wacom tablet to redraw a good half of the border/name and went from there, took a little more time but it was worth it in th end I think.

Heres some details: