Fruit Bats at The Sinclair, Cambridge

Poster for a Fruit Bats concert at The Sinclair, Cambridge, on November 6, 2019. For the band name, designer Darryl Norsen went with Sea weed, a set of billowing underwater caps drawn by Armin Haab in 1960 and shown in the second issue of Lettera. Or, more specifically, he used Polly, which is a phototype adaptation with solid letters that’s reproduced in two of the alphabet sourcebooks compiled by Dan X. Solo for Dover in the 1970s and 1980s. From Darryl:

Eric Johnson and I met via mutual friends and hit it off in a way that we both have a love for esoteric California design from the 1960s and 1970s that leans kind of psychedelic but also is just wholesome and dreamy. When I started this poster I was watching a whole bunch of original Twilight Zone episodes so inspiration from these kind of far off fantasies and unknown lands found itself within this poster. I don’t know if there is a story here per se but it certainly feels like a daydream. I have been trying to find a place to use Sea weed/Polly forever, but its a super temperamental typeface in that it immediately lets you know that it isn’t working when you drop it into a layout. This time I laid it in and it instantly felt right. So I started building the framing around it, and it just lives in a very harmonious way at the top, while letting everything underneath it breathe and not clash. I hope I can find another place to use it again someday, but it will show itself before I find it, I am sure.

“POSTER” looks like it could have been drawn based on OP-Letter, another Lettera face, but the similarity is not as close that it would qualify for a typeface credit. All smaller type is done in Futura Medium and Bold. Darryl thickened up the type so that it looks like it gathered an ink spread during printing.

The poster measures 18×24 inches and was screen printed in three colors on French Raspberry Frost paper. A signed artist edition is available from Darryl’s web shop.