Keeling Group

Today we're putting our new poster for Bonnaroo 2009 up on our online store. Designing for Bonnaroo is always an interesting challenge in that there are dozens upon dozens of band names to include. This makes prominently featuring any of the artists difficult, so, having designed three other Bonnaroo posters, we usually push the band names off to the side or the bottom and let some kind of type or imagery take center stage. This year I wanted to try to make the bands jump out and be the stars of the poster and came up with the idea to represent each group with an illustrated icon. Some of them are literal (David Byrne's white jacket), some are inside jokes that only fans of the band will know (Phish's vacuum cleaner), some are references to song titles (Yeah Yeah Yeah's ""Gold Lion""), and others just came to mind when thinking about the artist (an anvil for the American musical workhorse Bruce Springsteen... THE BOSS). For visual inspiration, I was looking at a lot of scuzzed-out and worn-down illustrations like the ones found in those 1970's magazine ads for selling greeting cards and getting hovercrafts and ham radios. Also, check out these bizarro Mexican dust bags. Here is the rough sketch I submitted to the folks at the festival to show them the direction I was planning to take: Here are some detail shots of the printed poster. Bennie did a top notch job making sure all the roughed-up nooks and crannies came out nice and scuzzy. Note the metallic purple ink! The poster goes on sale at 2pm Central time on the Burlesque online store. Don't miss out! Have you re-signed up for our newsletter? If you want to stay up on all the Burlesque news, poster releases, and events, make sure you're subscribed for our all new mailing list. See the right-hand column of our website and get crackin'!