Detail from the poster I created for “The Sunshine Boys.”
Sandy Actor’s Theatre
Being a lifelong supporter of the arts and of small businesses, I was happy to bring my illustration and marketing skills to the Sandy Actor’s Theatre. The Sandy Actor’s Theatre is a regional community theatre in the Portland, Oregon market. Their five productions per year cover a wide range of genres and bring together community members of all ages. To do that, they rely on strong designs and layouts to promote each production. The goals of my poster designs were to reflect the key concepts and themes of each production with eye-catching illustrations that would draw in a regional audience who might resonate with those themes.
My favorite posters are those for The Sunshine Boys and A Tuna Christmas. For the former, it was a unique challenge to recreate the texture of straw hats in a digital illustration. For the latter, I had too much fun designing wrapping paper with the silhouette of Texas.
The rack cards were simple giveaways that listed the theme of each season and the corresponding plays. As rack cards are more informational than anything else, the project necessitated a consistent, reliable format with just enough variation to make the content stand out. As I had to accomplish this task in a small space, I opted to make the cards typographically interesting above all else. I created the three themes as type-locks with their respective signature colors. In the end, the type-locks used the same amount of space every time and listed all of the plays in each season.
The original sign at the Sandy Actor’s Theatre (left) was hand-painted. Consequently, it needed to be completely redone for every production, which was costly and inefficient. I designed the new sign to use consistent information—namely, the theatre’s name and contact information—as a base that would stay intact between shows. The base also had a large, wooden slider, so that any rotating information (such as the names and runtimes of shows) could be easily inserted or replaced.