I did the this poster for DIT Fest. The event is coming up on September 11th and 12th in Kent, OH. I’ve attended the past two years, and I plan on going again this year. DIT Fest is a celebration of DIY punk, folk, and indie rock both acoustic and electric. Some great backs, both local and out-of-town, play for two days at the Vineyard in my old stomping grounds near Kent State University. I grew up in Portage county, graduated from Crestwood High School in Mantua, just outside of Kent in 2000. Kent was THE place to hangout my latter years of high school and into college, so I have a lot of nostalgia looking back at the good times had. It was great to be able to work on something close to home.
On a design related note, I played upon that nostalgia as well as some of the prominent feelings that the founder of DIT Fest founder and organizer Matt (No Target Audience, The Sidekicks, American War) told me in our initial talks. He wanted to celebrate community, nature, the spirit of helping each other out, and “doing it together.” Hence the name.
My concept was a series of trees with their branches intertwined as if they were holding hands. If you look hard enough you can see it, but really the point of the poster is to emphasize community, nostalgia, positivity, and down-home fun. I didn’t want to do the typical hand-drawn indie thing that seems to characterize most people’s stereotypes of DIY music and art.
Designers Note: Getting the band names to line up in that shape around the tree took 3-4 hours into the early morning to perfect. It was like putting together a puzzle trying to figure out which band names were the best combination to put together to get the correct shape. Once I had it about 95% right, some tinkering of the kerning and word spacing really made it a solid fit.
I love the text; how it’s a bit on the fuzzy side like a silkscreen. Is that part of your design or the printing?
That’s part of the design, I don’t have photos yet of the printing. A nice technique is to blur the text and then sharpen it. It does wonders!
Ha? I didn’t know that one
How did you work that guy out? Ps? Ai?
It’s all Photoshop, except for I guess the trees which I did in AI first then pasted into PS.
I don’t even want to think about the size of the psd file!
Whoa, I was at DIT Fest last year and kept this poster for my “inspiration collection”(small world)… great work!