Over the summer, Maia Guterbock, a comedy queen and one of my closest friends, decided to host a comedy show, and she asked me to design the posters for the event. She first sent me a few examples of posters for inspiration, and once we had gathered a general outline, we collaborated from there on out. Luckily, a lot of our ideas were fairly similar, so the whole project was super smooth sailing.  

One of my favorite things to do with graphic design is create minimalist, cartoon versions of people, which is pretty obvious if you look at some of my other pieces. She wanted to incorporate some part of herself on the poster, as she was the sole host and producer of the show, which is when I suggested a cartoon Maia for the poster. We decided to add a few comedic elements to highlight that the event was a comedy show. The few final touches were her cat, Nimbus, a cup of Boba tea, and a name tag sticker that says, “Hello my name is Comedy.” We included this because the original title of the show was Comedy? We Know Her!  

Last but not least was the background and color scheme. I always struggle with finding good color combinations for my projects, but Maia had, fortunately, already designed a color scheme. Because she’s a huge fan of the 80s and 90s, especially the comedy scene from those decades, she suggested we use the neon, blue-pink Ombre and 90s squiggle pattern to integrate that late-night comedy aesthetic.

The actual designing of the poster on Illustrator took about five hours total. I began as I always do with the cartoons by taking a picture of the person posted as their cartoon would appear. I then collected stock images of all the featured objects on the poster, and these provided me something to trace over in Illustrator. Later, I made a corresponding poster that listed the names of the performers in the show, using a template similar to that of music festival posters. The whole project took about half a day to complete. The show was also a great success, and I am so proud of Maia for putting it all together! She was super collaborative through the whole process and I greatly enjoyed working with her.