Tuesday, August 21, 2007

WPA-Style Denali Poster

Each summer the MSCVB puts out a series of 4 black and white ads, each covering a different aspect of the Mat-Su Borough (glacier hikes, fishing, canoeing/boating, RVing, etc). This year we changed it up a bit by making the ads look like WPA posters from the 1930's, featuring illustrations by me. :D

We've since carried the WPA flavor over to the 2008 Mat-Su Visitor Guide. The guide breaks the Mat-Su Borough into 5 regions and each region gets its own WPA-style postage stamp. The above image is actually for the "Off the Beaten Path" region, which is everything in the borough that is not road-accessible, but I thought the sky was a good place for text and so dressed it up as a Denali poster just for fun.

The background is closely based on an actual WPA poster for Montana or something - the mountains came pre-resembling Denali so I borrowed their design, though drew it from scratch and did my own color theme. The Cessna 180 is from a photo I took - the colors are totally changed (the original plane was white with brown).

I'll have to upload those ads and the other stamps sometime.

2 comments:

ritu said...

very very nice!
we have something called "hinglish" which is how look at the English language.
look forward to more of your blogs

Kara Stenberg said...

Thanks, ritu - I hope you enjoy my blog!

I'd love to see some "hinglish". I think language is wonderful, especially when used as art. I like "engrish" so much because I like how the Japanese design with fun and gusto. A lot of times, they don't care that they don't know what the words mean, just so long as it LOOKS good, and I know a lot of Westerners do the same thing with Asian characters, too. If it looks good, use it - and hey, if it makes someone smile, all the better. =D