Things that *happened* to one of my designs

Sometimes you make a thing. And then someone takes that thing, sews wings on it, and makes it fly.

It happened in the past few months when my choir director - Ed - asked me to make the design for the annual summer concert that is held every year in a large venue in Barcelona. Large because the choir contains between 220 and 260 singers, depending on the season. It´s a beautiful community which I am honored to be part of, so of course I said yes to Ed.

While making the poster, I was going through one of the hardest times of my life. I could have put every project on hold, and it would have been understood. However, continuing to work and engaging with people outside of my crisis zone, really helped me.

The concept was to represent visually the essence of the choir, and I have to say we went through many visuals, including a “paella” - a pan where some little people were being fried into (we obviously didn’t go for that), a typically Barcelona-inspired summer scenery and then we ended up finding consensus on using only abstract shapes, and using lots of colours.

We ping-ponged for a while, changed shapes and eliminated those that looked too much like something, then we ended up with what you can see here.

Usually posters and tote bags are made to be sold to singers and to concert-goers (around 1000 per concert), but this time something else happened: the image grew wings or Ed put wings on it.

For the first time the choir changed the colour of the outfit that it typically uses for concert: black. As you can see that changed into all the colours that were used in the poster.

And on top of that, Ed created a very special outfit for himself, as you can see in the picture.

T-shirts were also made. And I will soon receive mine too :-)

Seeing a little piece of work of mine taking all of those shapes made me emotional.

Have you ever thought about all the things you can do when you work with an illustrator or a graphic recorder like me?