Our new line of prints: Vintage Ad Follies

The first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem. OK—we admit that we are addicted to vintage advertising art and travel posters. So you’d think that after studying old advertising art for decades, creating over 80 classic poster designs for our Spirit of Nashville Collection, then doing more than 50 designs for our Art & Soul of America Collection, we might have gotten tired of the stuff.

As you’ll see, we have only dug in deeper, cranking out loads of new art that looks like it was found in a dusty corner of a defunct print shop. (We put the FUNK in defunct by salvaging and recycling pieces of our older designs and giving them new life with new color palettes and themes.)

All of this has resulted in our latest series of classic prints called Vintage Ad Follies: it’s a collection of faux advertising prints for products that never actually existed—but probably would have if we were alive back in the 1940s and 50s. Some of the designs were created for special occasions—like the upcoming elections, or prints for baby showers and decorating nurseries. Others have no real reason for existing whatsoever, except for the fact that we always wanted to illustrate a poster promoting bacon, chocolate milk, or hula dancers.

 
America is going to be sick of the elections by the time they finally get here in November—so we have created some art to help everyone survive by poking fun at the whole spectacle. (We are equal-opportunity spoofsters, so we have created something for political pundits on both sides of the isle.) Here are the first 2 designs in a series that will grow with the headlines for the next several months!

The style gurus at Fab.com love our prints so much that they will feature our new poster collections 4 times this year (on Feb 23rd, May 17th, August 30th, and November 15th.) For each of these special sales, we will introduce new lines of prints, building on our love of hand-lettering, illustration, and adapting bits of old public domain art to create new prints with an old look and feel. This is a peek at some of the new designs we’ve just completed for the Fab.com sale.

Some of these are designs already available on our Anderson Design Group Studio Store site. Others will be for sale exclusively on Fab.com from February 23-25. Enjoy!

Our pals at Farm Boy Brands asked us to create a few more designs for their upcoming apparel collections. (They create cool stuff for folks who dig life on the farm.) We love working with them—our illustrative design is a natural fit with their vintage-Americana style.

The process works like this: their art director sends us a list of phrases and shirt colors. We sketch up rough ideas. Once they sign off on our sketches, we roll up our sleeves and fine-tune the designs to reproduce in 3 to 5 solid ink colors for screen printing or stitched designs on t-shirts, pillow cases, hats, etc. The hat shown above is a spin-off from a best-selling shirt Ligia designed last year.

Andy sketched up this concept for the Sunride Sunset shirt. With a simple color change, this design went from a rugged dude shirt to a sassy chick-tee!

Ligia got her hands dirty creating two design options for the Get Your Dirt On shirt. While both options were very cool, the simpler, cleaner design won out in the end.

Here are two more shirt designs we did for the 2012 catalog. All of these designs will be featured in the Farm Boy Brands Spring/Summer 2012 Collection and Fall/Winter 2012 Collection.

Check out all the fabulous Farm Boy/Farm Girl designs at their official web site!

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.