Description

CUT COPY / FOALS POSTER 2011. 11X17″ OFFSET ON ARCHIVAL MATTE CARDSTOCK.

This Cut Copy / Foals Poster 2011 has the unique honor of being the first poster I ever designed for the Granada Theater in Dallas was for the “dream bill” (to me anyway) of Cut Copy, Foals, The Naked and Famous, and Holy Ghost!. Seriously, can you even imagine that embarrassment of riches? Thats a “call in sick the next day” lineup.

My initial concept was to riff on the famous Polish poster for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, long one of my favorite pieces of bold, minimal, tech (at least in the analogue method of its day) graphic design. It was a rare case of a poster making me want to see a film straight off. I remember seeing it in a collection of 70s movie posters in the late 90s and thinking “I have to see whatever this is” and frankly I think loving that poster design so much helped me to have more patience with the (very deliberately paced, to say the least) film. Looking back, this poster manages to perfectly capture the feeling of the film: its cold and can feel sterile but theres also a humanity to its precision. A real and very human hand behind it all that you can feel at work.





Plus its just funky as hell. Imagine seeing that in a cinema lobby in 1973 next to like Benji Come Home or whatever.

So the original plan was to make this one a very minimal homage to that design, but things never really quite end up the same as they start. In the end you have no choice but to make things yours and often its in-process that that happens. A few years later I would tap into a similar vibe for Foals’ appearance at Ace of Spades in Sacramento.