Summer Solstice Invite Design

This project involved conceptualizing an event and its invitation system. I wanted to work into my passion of mountain biking and thought a 10k cross country race benefiting the Wildlands Conservancy would be a great design to combine two of my passions.

I started with a stock image of a cyclist and posterized it in Photoshop. From there, I took it into Illustrator and worked some sketching in to frame the image. Then, it was working back and forth between Illustrator and InDesign to settle the typography. I used an old classic, Railroad Gothic for the primary logo and type. The Wildlands Conservancy logo is featured in the top right corner.

The overall design is inspired by grungy surfing event posters from the 90s. I love using letterforms as shapes and fitting them together like mosaics, so the logo layout is set completely manually.

In addition to the printed poster, I wanted to create a digital social media piece. This short is a collaboration with my friends Teg Ritchie (the cyclist) and Kevin Federico of the band Landline (soundtrack). The footage was fun to film in the evening and the crash was not planned, but worked out to have a much better story in the short amount of time I was working with. I am also never happy with the royalty free music available online, so I reached out to Kevin and he supplied this excellent grunge section from Landline's song, John Henry.