It should be a great concert and the LCO is in the midst of making some big slashes this year, so come on out for an evening of great 20th century music!

I recently completed a program book and advertising for a celebration of Franz Liszt in honor of his 200th birthday. The events are free and a schedule of events can be found here!

These are a couple of spreads from the inside of the program book.

I just finished a new logo for a custom french horn maker, Sorley Horns. It was a lot of fun to work on and it’s fascinating to look at those instruments and think about making one from scratch! These guys do amazing work and it was a real pleasure to work with them.

This is a new poster for the upcoming KU Wind Ensemble concert featuring several works for french horn. Lots of twists and turns in that instrument, but it’s beautiful when played well!

This is a poster I did for a jazz/wind ensemble concert that featured the new tenor saxophone concerto GO! by Bob Mintzer with Vince Gnojek on saxophone. The concert also featured a new Dan Gailey arrangement of Radiohead’s Knives Out as well as one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, Hang Gliding by Maria Schneider.

My loose inspiration for the poster was the artwork for Dexter Gordon’s incredible jazz album Go . That album, besides being one of the great jazz recordings in history, was designed by Reid Miles who did several classic album designs for Blue Note records. I hope at least a couple of people picked up on the “Go” connection!

Design by Reid Miles

Below is the premier performance of GO! (3rd mvt.) featuring Bob Mintzer with the University of Kentucky Wind Ensemble. It’s a difficult piece that is a nice blend of jazz elements with wind ensemble writing. It contains some altissimo lines that are crazy hard!

I was very excited to be asked to design the second album for Allégresse titled Fresh Ink. The album contains 3 brand new works for flute, oboe, and piano by acclaimed composers Ingrid Stölzel, Kip Haaheim and Gabriela Lena Frank as well as a 20th Century work by William Grant Still.

Here are just a few of the ink spots I came up with in search of the “right ones” for the artwork. For most of them, I used an ink wash and a straw to blow the ink around the page. It’s still pretty unpredictable that way, but at least you can give it some direction.

One major goal for the design was to move towards a modern feel since it’s all new music. In addition to the literal depiction of the title, the ink spots reflect the new works making a splash in the existing canon of chamber music for flute, oboe and piano. I like the spot on the front that loosely resembles a dancer and the half-circle spot on the disc face which reference two of the new works Canto y Danza and Halo respectively.

It’s always exciting anytime new work is commissioned and beautifully executed and this album is certainly no exception. Here’s a great review of Fresh Ink that gives a much more eloquent description than I can give!

Visit the Allégresse website for information on purchasing this CD.

I just launched a new identity and web site project for a music organization in New York City called Ars Viva Music. Ars Viva consists of 3 main parts, a private music studio, small chamber music ensembles for special events and commissions, and a larger chamber orchestra. I love doing graphic design for classical musicians, so this was right up my alley!

Above is just a snippet of the sketching I did before doing a few refined logo sketches on the computer.

Home Page

I’m excited about this site, in particular, because it represents my first efforts in coding in HTML5. It really just takes advantage of the new semantic markup which I really like. I think it’s going to make for a much cleaner and easier to read web someday. I also think HTML5 will be great for people who rely on assistive technology to surf the web (like screen readers and such). I’m looking forward to the audio and video portions of HTML5, too, so I hope that technology becomes more mainstream soon. For more information, I found Dive into HTML5 very helpful as well as HTML5 for Web Designers.

View the Ars Viva web site online!

Secondary Page

I recently did some new business cards for saxophonist (and a certain person’s father!) Vince Gnojek. I used a blind contour drawing I had done a few years back and it created a nice texture on the back of the card!

This was a fun new identity project for percussionist Cory Hills who has a side project called The Percussive Art of Storytelling. The project also included a few other pieces of collateral including a letterhead and mailing label. I had taken some photographs for Cory about a year ago and was excited to be able to use them on back side of the business cards!

This is a flyer I did for the Midwest Double Reed Society’s 2010 Double Reed Festival in Lawrence, KS. It’s a great group of people to work with and, since they use their fliers as mailers, posters and handouts, it’s always a challenge to create a piece that serves all purposes.

I love doing graphic design for classical musicians and so I was thrilled when violinist Tami Lee Hughes asked me to design a web site for her. She’s an extremely talented musician (look for her CD to come out soon!) and I had a lot of fun shooting her photos earlier in the year, too.

The site is hand-coded and implements a custom CSS design with jQuery and BlueprintCSS running behind the scenes. The site just launched, so you can check it out at www.tamileehughes.com!

I just finished up a children’s CD with percussionist Cory Hills titled The Lost Bicycle. The album consists of several fun, original works for percussion and storytelling including The Lost Bicycle, Tikki Tikki Tembo, and The Turnip. For the project, I did all the artwork, layout and photography. For more information on the CD or to order yourself a copy, contact Cory at his website.

The Lost Bicycle

The Turnip

I recently did a poster for the University of Georgia that centered around a musical piece called The Here and Now by Christopher Theofanidis. The work is based on selected poems by the Persian poet Rumi and uses the powerful and mysterious qualities of band and choir. They wanted it to have a decidedly Middle Eastern/Turkish feel to it and so I thought it would be the perfect chance to try doing some hand-drawn calligraphy.

I should make it clear that I drew all of the type in Adobe Illustrator and didn’t actually get out the calligraphy pens (mostly due to a tight deadline), but it was a lot of fun to do and I hope to do more things like it in the future. My apologies to the purists out there!

Here’s a quick pencil sketch that I used as a starting point for the illustration.

And here’s the final type!

You can hear some audio clips of the piece on Amazon. It’s pretty powerful classical music written for band and choir.

Update: Here’s an interesting article about Arabic calligraphy and digital fonts.