Bird-Dog: Collaboration Poster

This project was meant to be a poster for a fictional concert by the 1980’s band, The Verlaines. With a partner, the project prompt was to create a poster that fit the bands style, and to make it seem as realistic as possible. This poster was designed and created by myself and my partner, Chandler Peterman.

The poster depicts a dog standing on a floating ledge while looking up at a bird. These animals are iconic from their hit song “Bird Dog”, have appeared on their albums before, and the dog represents a dog the band owned at the time of the albums creation. As such we believed it fitting to keep these animals in the poster. The bands songs mostly deal with fighting depression, so we chose colors that are somber and somewhat dark for the most part, going as far as to use a burnt looking orange for the sky instead of a blue to represent the depressing themes. The pure white dove though, symbolizes the upbeat, positive themes of winning against depression that most of their music ends with in the last few seconds of each song. The ledge is iconic from their Bird Dog album cover and represents the fragility of life in that artwork. In our poster, we took it a step further by making the ledge detached from the earth to give a stronger sense of danger to the dog’s position. Finally, it’s also worth mentioning we hand wrote all the text because The Verlaines seem to enjoy the handwritten aesthetic on most of their merchandise and album covers.

Overall, we did quite a bit of research on the band, their music, and what fans thought of their music to create this album. We even added details to the poster such as a backup band that would have played with them in real life called The Chills on the poster, and their record label’s logo as well to make it all more realistic. In my opinion, the entire project was a success and the band themselves would more than likely enjoy this poster.

Programs Used:

• Photoshop