Tasty NEW 2012 Music City Wall Calendar!

Each year, we create a new series of vintage style illustrated prints. And each year, we partner with McQuiddy Printing (a local 100 year-old printer) to produce a limited edition promotional calendar featuring our new designs.

Nashville’s unique combination of excellent food, music and art has always inspired us. And so it was pretty easy to sink our teeth into this year’s calendar theme—we just went around Music City tasting everything from chocolate to BBQ sauce, wine, Soul Food, doughnuts, pancakes, tacos, roasted nuts to coffee, fried chicken and cupcakes. Then we worked off all the calories by creating loads of delicious-looking poster art!

This year’s wall calendar features 13 months of classic poster art celebrating a different Nashville restaurant or shop with an 11” x 14” illustrated print. We have also included some photos and a little historical info, along with 8 recipe cards featuring tasty Music City food & drink ideas.

To create the calendar, we looked around town for 13 different icons of taste—award-winning establishments that define our city—places that are truly unique to Nashville. We worked with the owners of each restaurant or shop to tell their story in a poster design and via photos and text that we added to the calendar pages. We even asked for (and got) 8 recipe ideas from these award-winning restaurant owners to include on a set of 8 recipe cards!

This calendar features several brand-new designs plus a few beloved classics from our collection. We designed it so you can cut out the 13 ready-to-frame mini prints and decorate your walls with them. Our mini prints normally sell for $19 each. So at $24.95, this calendar is a real deal! Hurry and order yours before they sell out. They are available at our studio Store or on our Spirit of Nashville web site.

Hume-Fogg 100th Anniversary Print

1912 must have been an exciting year! This 100th anniversary poster for Hume-Fogg High School will be the 3rd 100th anniversary poster we've done in recent months (the other centennials will be celebrated by The Girl Scouts and East Nashville's Shelby Park).

We had wanted to create a Hume-Fogg poster for a long time, and though we’d had a few requests over the years, we weren't sure if there was a large enough audience for it. Boy, were we wrong! Over the last few months the Hume-Fogg Alumni Association gathered support by pre-selling over 400 prints. With that sort of interest in the print, we were happy to oblige. Staff designer/illustrator Andy Gregg was put on the case, and below is his process from start to finish.

This was the initial concept thumbnail. The Victorian/Edwardian style was chosen as the base aesthetic of the poster because it was popular at the time of Hume-Fogg's founding, and fit somewhat with the Tudor Revival style of the school building.  Originally, just a sword was placed beneath the type as a nod to the the Blue Knight mascot.

This was the second thumbnail produced. Our contacts at Hume-Fogg wanted Hume-Fogg's old and new mascots added to the composition, so the poster would appeal to both old alumni—who identify as Blue Devils, and new—who are known as the Blue Knights. The dates 1912-2012 were added and the composition was fleshed-out more. A clean outer border was added to counteract the overwrought nature of the chosen Edwardian style.

Eventually the composition was ready for its final iteration. Andy enjoys the boring minutia of type design, and thus created all of the lettering from scratch. He also started drawing the Hume-Fogg building from reference photography he shot. Because of these two facts, this poster was possibly the design that took the most man hours to complete of any poster in the history of ADG. We fear Andy may have temporarily lost feeling in his clicking fingers and permanently lost part of his soul.

See the lack of luster in his eyes? That luster is now in the poster.

It was well worth it though, as the response we have gotten has been tremendous. Andy even signed a limited number of 50 for a select few alumni. For those who didn't pre-order a print through the Alumni Association: don't fret. We have about 150 extra prints for sale here at ADG in our studio store. Each print sells for $39. Stop by, pick up a print and say hi!

NEW Classic Chicago Posters

Our Art & Soul Of America Collection of prints and gifts continues to grow. Thanks to Fab.com, Pinterest, and other cool design-oriented sites, folks from all over the world have been checking out our work, buying our prints, and decorating homes and offices in classic Chicago style. Spurred on by the success of our early Chicago concepts, we have expanded our collection of Windy City prints to 9 designs. We will keep adding new art as inspiration and demand dictates!

The first few designs were by Andy Gregg and Luke Howard working under the direction of Joel Anderson, the creator of the Art & Soul of America Collection. More recent Chicago prints by Andy Gregg, Julian Baker and Shelby Roddefer have helped to expand the series and bring even more variety to the line. For example, Andy was inspired by the 1960s-era travel posters published by TWA. So he created a beautiful Buckingham Fountain design that leans more toward modern design than his popular Deco-era Chicago Theatre or Magnificent Mile prints. Below is a row of TWA posters that inspired his Buckingham Fountain creation (featured under the TWA designs):

Below are examples of the period range our Chicago designs have covered—from Julian Baker’s early 20th century Water Tower design to Shelby Roddifer’s contemporary 21st century Cloud Gate design.

 

So far, this Deco-style design by Luke Howard has been the best-selling print in the collection. Our 6-piece set of vinyl magnets has become a popular stocking stuffer item for the holidays!

Stay tuned to see how our other lines are coming along. New York and San Francisco are also becoming very popular print series, too. They can be seen at our ArtAndSoulOfAmerica.com site.

New Poster Series Celebrates 100 Years of Girl Scouting!

This coming year marks the 100 year anniversary of the Girl Scouts! To commemorate the event, the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee asked us to create four poster designs, each celebrating a unique tradition of Girl Scouting. We started out with the most important step...gathering research (ahem, Girl Scout Cookies) for "inspiration". Four empty boxes later, we were full of inspiration! As with every poster design project, we started out with sketches. After several sketches, four concepts were submitted and approved.

The challenge was to create four distinct designs, but still have them look as though they belonged in a series. Ligia, our on-staff designer and illustrator headed up the project. Her solution was to include the same border treatment with each design. The borders not only hint at the Girl Scout Trefoil shape, but also contain the Girl Scout Law; the credo of Girl Scouting.

After several long hours of illustrating, the posters were completed and sent to print. McQuiddy Printing here in Nashville took care of the printing and did a fantastic job. These posters not only celebrate the legacy of Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee, but childhood innocence and the memory of simpler days gone by. If you'd like to get your hands on one, they are available for purchase at our studio store.

Ligia signing the first posters hot off the press!

Online Shopping & Inspriation for Design Lovers

There are a few amazing sites out there where design buffs go for daily inspiration. Fab.com is one of our favorites. A few months ago, we were delighted to get a call from them. (It was quite flattering to have this hip, online retailer from New York invite us to do a 72-hour sale to showcase and sell our Art & Soul Of America prints!) The sale was a smashing success, and we immediately began getting calls from as far away as Dubai from people who had discovered our design firm because they, too were Fab junkies.

Fab.com just announced adding their one millionth member—they clearly are making a lot of people happy all over the world!

We are now doing another 72-hour sale with Fab.com. It started on November 17, and will go through Nov. 18 & 19.) Be sure to check it out! You’ll see lots of great stuff from some very talented creative people. They are also offering our prints at a 31% discount. If you miss it, don’t fret—we hope to be doing more with Fab in 2012. Here is a special invite to become a member: http://fab.com/koyhpc.

We asked the folks at Fab if they would grant us an interview for our design blog, and they were very gracious. Enjoy...

ADG: For those who may not have ever heard of Fab.com, tell us about it.
Fab: Fab.com is the fastest growing e-commerce site on the planet. In just five months, we've attracted over 1 Million members. We feature 12-14 new designer-specific sales a week. Sales typically last 72 hours, though in September we introduced the pop up shop concept, showcasing different themed "shops" that last longer than our normal sales - the shops typically last around 40 days. We offer a broad range of design products including furniture, wall decor, jewelry, gadgets, artwork and more all at a discount to our members.

ADG: How does Fab.com choose what items to feature on the site?
Fab: Fab.com chooses products that are unique, well-made, have a good story behind them and, most importantly, will make our staff and our members smile.

Fab's curation process is led by Chief Creative Officer and design guru, Bradford Shellhammer, with support from his buying team. Fab scours the globe in pursuit of eclectic products, researching online, attending different shows and vetting inbound requests from designers and artists.

ADG: Why did you contact Anderson Design Group and ask them to do a Fab.com sale?
Fab: We reached out to ADG because we loved the story behind the vintage travel prints and the idea of paying tribute to the travel promotions of the early to mid-1900s. Again, we love when there's a good story behind the product and artist, and we knew our users would love the classic, vintage American travel prints. At Fab, we are into travel, art, and all things vintage, so it was the perfect combination.

ADG: What new or interesting things are happening at Fab.com in 2012?
Fab: We have lots of new and exciting things coming up in 2012. We plan to keep expanding and improving our site, delivering even more fun, unique and well designed products to our ever-growing membership. In addition, you expect to see more pop up shops in 2012. Overall, we hope to continue delighting our customers with Fab products and customer service.

Our NEW Metro Parks Poster Series...

One of our favorite TV shows is Parks and Recreation. So imagine our glee when we got a call from Metro Parks asking us if we would consider creating a series of prints that would celebrate Nashville’s favorite city parks. We quickly figured out that the Metro Parks folks are nothing like the comic misfits in the TV show. Instead, they actually work for a living, and they have very keen ideas about how to promote and celebrate Music City’s network of fantastic public parks. We sat down, made a list of the top 12 parks that would be featured in our art, and then we visited the first 3 parks on the list—McCabe Golf Course, Two Rivers Mansion, and Shelby Park.

We shot a ton of reference photos. It soon became apparent that parks can be very hard to capture in one image. Poster art is all about simple, iconic imagery. How do you choose a single feature of a park that covers hundreds of acres? We challenged ourselves to look for one stand-out feature of each park—a visual icon that would represent a key reason why you’d want to visit that park. For McCabe, it was a golfer in the foreground and the club house in the distance. Since the land the golf course sits on today was once an old airport, we placed a biplane (used in the McCabe’s logo) in the sky.

Two Rivers Mansion is really all about the beautiful old house. So to make it more interesting, we worked up some fancy hand lettering and rendered the whole piece in a fancy woodcut engraving style.

Shelby Park was the biggest challenge. This park is huge, and has baseball fields, a lake, golf courses, a nature center, walking trails, a dog park, and some really bizarre alien-like concrete structures built in the 1920s (which still have the most interesting graffiti scrawled on them by star-struck lovers who are now older than our grandparents!) One distinct feature of Shelby Park is the train trestle that can be seen from almost every vista. It’s not technically a part of the park, but when we talked to folks about what they think of first, many thought it was a very memorable and nostalgic feature.

The 3 prints turned out very differently. Since this is a series of 12 different designs, we wanted to provide a wide array of art styles so we’d create art for every taste. Joel Anderson did the McCabe poster, swiping the golfer that former staff artist Darren Welch created several years ago for a print that is no longer available. (We are into recycling here!) Joel and Liga Teodosiu created the Two Rivers print in the style that would have been popular in the mid 1800s when the mansion was built. Andy Gregg rendered the Shelby Park print with a stylish Art Deco feel, paying homage to the period when the park was opened.

The detail in these posters is a big part of their charm. It’s hard to appreciate the texture and fine detail on-line, so you might just have to come to our studio store and see the prints in person! They are also available on-line at www.SpiritOfNashville.com

Amazing (and Slightly Creepy) Photo Project

 

We found this project via Slate and had to share. Dutch Photographer Ari Versluis and his creative partner Ellie Uyttenbroek have been categorizing different styles of dress for the past 15 years in a photo project they have dubbed Exactitudes (a combination of "exact" and attitudes"). They identify generally unintentional but nonetheless rigid subcultures/identity systems amongst different populations and then photograph the members of said subcultures. The results are both startling and intriguing. Check out the Exactitudes site to see the full breadth of their work.