A few months ago John and Hank Green put on an event at Carnegie Hall and went on a UK Tour, and they asked me to design the merchandise for these shows. I was really sad that I couldn’t be in New York for the Carnegie Hall show (or Europe for the tour) but I was happy to help and be at least a small part of these really exciting events. Keep reading for more thoughts on all the designs!
I tried to keep the Carnegie Hall poster pretty classy and simple, setting it in Interstate and adding some visual interest by layering the Thin typeface on top of the Bold one. I tried to add little touches of nerdfighter references, like the hand symbol in the corners, the tiny angerfish above The Mountain Goats, and the venn digrams separating the event info.
I also had to leave a big blank space for John and Hank to sign, which looks a little funny on the DFTBA website where you don’t see their signatures. I also specifically asked them to only sign in black, blue, or silver, to not clash with the color scheme, but of course they didn’t listen. Oh well. #graphicdesignerproblems
The UK Tour poster was inspired by this poster that I originally found on Pinterest, and I just loved the idea of interlocking boxes with a different image in each box. I borrowed some of the illustrations I had originally designed for the John Green box set, and also grabbed some of the images I had put on the Carnegie Hall poster.
I designed a shirt to match the poster, but unfortunately, the organizers of the tour didn’t keep any extras of the shirt or poster so I don’t have them to photograph. But, I used my magical Tumblr-searching abilities to find these photos from people who got to go to the tour and bought some merch: fellowshipofthetardis, imhugeinbelgium, youtubands, thisisntkatherinesblog
If anyone has an extra shirt of any size that they want to send me, please send me an email at karenkavett@gmail.com!
So if you got to go to any of the events on this tour, I’m super jealous, but I hope you like the designs I made. And if you didn’t get to go, the signed Carnegie Hall poster is still available to buy from DFTBA so you can always just pretend you were there. Thanks so much for reading!
