C.J. Box Author Talk Promotional Series
A local literary consortium, The Virginia Peninsula Literary Consortium (VPLC), is hosting an author talk and book signing in the fall of 2017, welcoming western author, C.J. Box. We were asked to create a poster, program cover, ticket, and bookmark to promote the event.
As C.J. Box is an author who writes western books, those that take place in the mid-west of the US and deal a lot with farmland, mountains, and deserts, I knew I wanted to get that feel for my design without going too far. I looked through the covers of his books and noticed they were mostly of empty landscapes in stereotypical western locations.
Being that we live in Southeastern Virginia, and there aren't really any deserts or mountain ranges in this section of the state, finding that stereotypical western feel was going to be slightly difficult. Thankfully for me, though, my parents lived in a rural part of Southeastern Virginia, which also meant that they lived around a number of cattle farms, horse farms, corn fields, and cotton fields. I decided to take a drive out there and snapped a few pictures of the entrance to a few of the horse farms and overview shots of the cotton fields.
Once I decided on the horse farm road, I tried to stylize it so it was slightly more saturated than the original. From there, I looked at the text that's usually on Box's book covers and tried to mimic that by using Helvetica Neue LT Std.
I created the program cover first, because I wanted to see what part of the photo could end up on the front and how I would later adapt that to the poster, ticket, and bookmark. Once my main design was created, it was rather simple to adapt it to the other pieces.
The most difficult piece to adapt the design to was the ticket. Because of the small size of the ticket originally and having to adhere to the even smaller margin area, the design had to be altered much more than the other designs. For the ticket, the fencing is covered by a light blue overlay at a low opacity to make it easier to read the text. It's the same blue that is behind the "Admit One" to keep the tone the same.
