Kings of Convenience

A few months ago a friend of mine, one Ian McKinlay, emailed me asking if I could do a poster for a gig that was coming up in Hong Kong that the company he works for was putting on. I agreed instantly because I like Ian and I like making posters.

Turns out it was for Kings of Convenience, one of my favourite bands despite them sounding like "elevator music" as one of my former flatties put it. I prefer to think of them as the Scando version of Simon and Garfunkel (who were one of my favourite bands when I was 12). Worth checking out eh.

Anywho, Ian sent me through the rejected design from the previous designer so I could see what had already been done:

I thought it was really clunky (obviously, so did UNTITLED seeing as they got me in to do a new one) and while I liked the photo, I didn't think it was really all that attention grabbing... and I really, really did not like how the text was being treated by cramming it in boxes with some kind of bland Arial font.

So I decided to start from scratch. I wanted to do soem kind of sweet illustration but I get freaked out doing posters sometimes and the photos they supplied were really cool so I decided to just do a fairly straight edge poster. This is the first version I submitted:

Too much negative space and the information needed to be bigger. Ok. Let's try it again... and again using a different picture... and again with slightly different elements... (you can click on them to see larger versions)

The last option was their fave, so I tweaked the logo layout and the blend of the solid background into the photo and voila! Finished!

Hopefully I'll be working with these cats in HK more in the future. I'll be sure to keep you posted :)