Flamboyance
I hear this a lot:
"Wow!, Your art is wild/flamboyant/colorful/amazing..etc.."
Yes it is. When you are competing against 10,000 other graphic artists in a town where your 'graphic art' is displayed on a 35 foot plasma screen which is competing with 350 other 35 foot plasma screens, all on the same stretch of road, you do what you need to grab attention and hold it.
Of course I tone it down for the more conservative projects.
But the important thing is that no matter what the designs purpose it needs to flow, it needs to be balanced, it needs to look fabulous and eye-catching without looking tasteless or thrown together. There is a professional 'edge' to design that I believe we only learn with time and effort. It is very hard to define in words, but when you see it, you know it. And attaining this level of design matters, believe me.
In October we held a Mr. Olympia after-party. This was at the request of a Mr Olympia contender, whom we had met at another event we held at the Palms. This contender was expected to come in the top three and had placed in the top three in the Arnold Classic this year. In the course of the project we designed the 6x8 invitation cards and distributed them around town, targeting fitness clubs and healthfood stores, and at the Mr. Olympia Convention.
Then disaster struck. Our contender made an abysmal showing at the preliminaries on the morning of the event. Disaster for him and for us. We knew from experience that people do not want to be around "losers"- and something like that can kill an event. Worse, our afterparty was competing with three other top-billed and heavily advertised parties that same night.
But amazingly most of the former and current Mr. & Mrs. Olympia winners showed up at our event, along with hundreds of fans. I have never seen so many huge people in one place in my life - except possibly the Floyd Mayweather party the night he won his Belt.
During the party I did a little on-the-spot polling and I asked a few people why they chose our party in particular. Surprisingly, many individuals said "you guys had the best/coolest/sharpest invitation card so we knew that it was going to be a class affair.", and words to that effect. We discovered later that the other Mr. Olympia after-parties were a complete bust.
Which just goes to show that great design can psychologically overcome the odds and make all the difference in the world, flamboyant or conservative.
You can see the design (which we actually did not think was that fabulous because we had a very short timeline on development) at: http://www.athyrius.com/mr_olympia.html
Awesome story. Congrats on that. Can you post a copy of the invitation for us to see?
There you go Steve- I posted a quick page with the image, front and back of the card, at the bottom of the blog-post. As you see we used some mapping on the back as most of the guests we were expecting were from out of town.
Interesting stuff. I look forward to more graphical tales from Las Vegas.