New Work: Moonrise Kingdom

It's new work Monday! 

A big thanks goes out to Benjamin Lee and the folks over at Shortlist.com for featuring my newest re-imagined movie poster for Wes Anderson's forthcoming theatrical release Moonrise Kingdom. In theatres on May 25th!

I was approached by Benjamin a few months back about creating something for their latest alternate poster gallery for Moonrise, and I was more then happy to get in the head of Wes Anderson for a poster design. I am a big fan of Anderson's previous feature films like Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Royal Tenenbaum...(basically all of them). With Anderson's strong visual aesthetic which draws heavily on color and symmetry, I wanted to incorporate as much of his style into my final design as possible.

My idea to highlight Anderson's theme of symmetry manifested itself in the design of the record label. If you had a physical copy of the poster you will notice that I laid it out so that the top and bottom are reversible. Basically, you can pick your favorite character and flip it so they are right side up. There are a few other easter eggs that I was able to glean from the movie trailer and I was able to sneak into the design. One little such easter egg is that the record player head is taken directly from Suzy’s player in the movie trailer. I also framed each of the character portraits with music notes and paint-brushes, which are all elements I discovered in my many viewings of the trailer. 

While it is not the easiest thing to design a movie poster without seeing the whole movie, it was still a fun exercise and look forward to collaborating with Shortlist again in the future.

Please follow the links out the Shortlist.com and take a peek at the work by the other contributing artists. All great pieces.

Cheers, Ben.

Weighing Your Options: ECommerce for Designers

It's hard to believe, but I started the process of overhauling my online web presence nearly six month ago. Today marks the culmination of those efforts with the completion of the redesign of my online ecommerce store, movingthemerch.com. The goal I set out to accomplish was to bring a more cohesive design language to all of my websites, and I must say that I am very happy with the results. A few posts ago I talked about the choices I made going with Behance’s Prosite for my personal portfolio and I thought today I would discuss briefly the creation and evolution of my online store.

A look at my most recent storefront re-design for movingthemerch.comI could go on at length about the value of running your own online ecommerce store. To keep it brief: it’s a great way to get your name and work out there as a designer. You also learn a lot about running a professional business as well as self-marketing and online promotion. Consider that the nutshell version.
 
When I initially created movingthemerch.com over a year and a half ago, it was after starting a storefront with Zazzle.com. What I learned was that Zazzle was great at helping to driving traffic to your storefront thanks to their meta-data and active community. It was also nice that I didn’t have to worry about fulfillment or shipping, which is a big plus for going with Zazzle.

Basically how Zazzle works is they offer a fixed commission price on each piece of your art that is sold. It gets a little sticky in that fact that even if people order large-scale prints, your commission remains the same. You do get a small bonus if the buyer options for framing, but overall I felt I was leaving a lot of money on the table for Zazzle to walk away with in the end.
 
So, I got a little bold. I thought maybe I could pocket more of the profit if I found a way to run the storefront site myself and handle all my own fulfillment and shipping. A search of web-ready ecommerce stores brought up the usual suspects. I could go with a template and hope to figure out how to go about creating a secure payment process or I could go with a site like Etsy, Shopify, or Big Cartel. These sites allow you to work from their own templates to create a somewhat customized storefront and then they integrate a pay site like paypal or other secure pay service for all your billing needs. All for either a monthly fee or listing charge of course.
 
My selection process went a little something like this: Shopify was a little pricey and I think it would have been a little more of a gamble if I couldn’t make my sales targets. Etsy didn’t allow enough storefront customization for my likes, but I did like what I saw from Big Cartel. I knew a few established artists that I like used their service, Jeff Sheldon’s Ugmonk.com for one. I also liked that their pricing was pretty reasonable and I could get in either free or at a low price to start. The initial amount of customization was ok, but not earth shattering, however they have a good online support community and always respond timely to service emails. So, I chose Big Cartel and was off to the races.

A look at the my first movingthemerch.com site designHow I set up a fulfillment and shipping system is a story for another day, but I can say that after nearly a year and a half I have been pleased with the results after choosing to go with the Big Cartel. What I like is that the entire site is run from a easy to navigate Dashboard and they allow you to attach a custom domain as well as integrate Google Analytics, which is a great way to track web traffic and sales on your site. I am really amazed at the amount of data you can pull from Analytics. Info you can track includes sales reports and conversion rates. All good stuff to have access too for business planning.
 
All payments are handled through PayPal and overall I have been happy with the integration. You can actually do a lot more with PayPal then pay for items on Ebay, believe it or not. Since I started with Big Cartel over a year ago, they have been adding more and more features. The first big one was adding various methods for offering discounts. When I started with Big Cartel the lack of a good discount system was a hindrance to promotion, but they listen to their user base and I would say provide updates fairly regularly.
 
The most resent update to Big Cartel was a “big” one. They now allow more customization features and as luck would have it that was exactly what I needed to start my update to MovingTheMerch. You can see all the features by checking out this jazzy video from Big Cartel’s blog, just click the image:

Click on image to be taken to Big Cartel's Blog post and video about their new custimization featuresFor the code masters out there, you can do quite a bit of customization. If you have a good coding background, they let you edit the CSS and HTML right there in the Dashboard. I was able string together just enough code to make some minor tweaks. My overall goal was to clean up and standardize the look of all my sites and I think I was able to do that while not going code crazy by finding just the right hosting sites.

After nearly six months, I have managed to fine tune and clean up my entire website presenceAs I plan future goals, I want to expand on the types of offerings I bring to niche poster collectors. The new tagline, “Merchandise For The Discerning Collector,” will come to mean that collectors with a variety of different interests can find something cool and unique for their home or office. Very soon I will be bring my love of automobiles to the art poster as well as beefing up my geek presence with various comic book and pop culture tie in items.

For the Phish fans out there, I have some great ideas for new fan art for this year’s summer tour as well as retiring the remaining posters for 2011 for a while. On June 1, I will have my first new Phish fan art concert poster of the year available for purchase. To celebrate, I am offering 15% on all concert posters if you use the code 2011LASTCALL at check out.
 
More news to come and stay tuned for new work. Cheers, Ben. 

Rebuild Henryville Concert Poster Submission

Despite being neck deep in preparing for a video production that will take me to Belgium and the Netherlands in less then 24 hours, I managed to put together a quick little concert poster submission for Talenthouse. The poster is for the benefit concert to support the rebuilding of tornado damaged Henryville, Indiana that will be hosted by Lady Antebellum in May. You can help me get my poster printed by clicking the image and voting for my submission. Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge.

Click on the image and help my poster be printed!

I wanted to keep the overall design pretty simple and have nice vibrant colors with a rustic look to complement the country music tie-in to Lady Antebellum. The font is a recent purchase from myfonts.com called Veneer from Yellow Design Studio. The contest instructions indicated that the winning design will be made into a poster and t-shirt, so I wanted the design to be versatile enough to work either way.

I am actually from Southern Indiana in the Floyd Knobs area, which isn't too far from Henryville. I went to a private high school with several people from the effected area and thought this was a great opportunity to support a great benefit concert.

As a side note, I had never heard of the Talenthouse website until being sent the link to this contest. From looking around the site, it looks like a call for artists to submit work in a variety of mediums for various brands across music, sports, and business. The reward for winning is sometimes concert tickets, money, or just getting your work shown across big time outlets. I am not sure if this would be considered some type of spec work, but it does seem to be an interesting way to get your work out there.