Limitless Pulse

There were compromises made, and some of the fine tuning Lenny handled, but the flyer above is largely my creation.

A week and a half ago, we met at Lenny’s place. At the meeting, everyone gave me the green light to work on the flyer. Lenny’s a designer, so when Andrey brought it up, I looked immediately to him. “I like what you’ve done so far. Go for it,” he said.

At the end of last week, I took a trip to Parsons’ Gimbel Library to do research. I put a couple hours into collecting ideas — scanning and shooting inspiring pieces — and enjoyed the work I was finding immensely. The next day I sorted through the designs, and tried to visualize how I could integrate the various shots I’ve taken of the American Apparel installation around or into them. I struggled with this as when the raw material was stretched into various formats it broke down. Everybody intended that we keep the neon light motif, and running into a wall, I ditched my collected inspirational designs and approached the flyer from an entirely new angle.

Actually the angle wasn’t original. You can see what I came up with and how similar it is to the Moo cards I worked on a couple weeks ago. To some degree, the arrangement of the lights dictate how they can be laid out. I was initially working from the image that sparked this whole trajectory, but soon found that it simply wasn’t big enough. It being dark outside, I grabbed a camera and walked across the street. The image I shot is nearly identical to what you see on the flyer; it’s simply been stretched a bit. I knew exactly where the design was going when I saw it in the view finder on the LCD.

With the image (I only shot maybe 3) downloaded to my computer, I set off on trying to doctor it in Photoshop then lay out the text in InDesign. I’m an InDesign n00b, so things became tedious fairly quickly. Thankfully a quick call to Jonathan opened things up for me. He described the method of using the Photoshop path tool to lay out a shape that text can flow on or inside of. I got the flyer’s main details together and uploaded the rough design to Flickr where the others could take a look.

The peeps were largely enthusiastic about where it was headed.

Andrey stopped by a couple nights ago, and we finalized the design. We added a bit more copy as well as the icons for the lineup’s affiliations. The icons are the only thing I’m not entirely exhilarated with, but I can see how they’re valuable, and can live with them. Lenny took a final pass at it, and shrunk the copy stating the DJs’ affiliations a bit, and that was the end of it. I had a lot of fun piecing this flyer together, and am largely satisfied with the finished product.