A Cultural Revamp: Love, Peace & Spades
When Kevito Clark reached out to me to help revamp the look of his next Love, Peace, & Spades (LP&S) event I was excited extend my style in a way that I normally don’t. His goal was to have “this jawn to feel like an evolution, inviting, a welcome home yet culturally rich and dope AF.”
As a young lad with a full head of hair, I grew up playing Spades. Watching my friends become enemies while laughing and stealing books from each on the way to running the table. The rules of the game are established based on the home the game is played in. At its core, Spades is a communal game based on rules that brings people together. This deign for this had to have a strong rule set that would connect to that audience.
Spades players love to throw down cards on the table charged with the power of a thousand Big Jokers. The essence of that feeling would be the focus of the design that everything else would build on. I assumed it would be easy to find reference material of someone throwing a card down on the table. Through all my searches, the closest reference I could find was Indiana Jones. Definitely a weird connection but something about his pose made perfect sense. The strength, the confidence to win against all odds, the angle of the arm. In a way, aren’t we whipping cards onto the table anyway?
The creation of mood boards for my illustrations has become really important to my process. They shape the parameters of my concepts rather than just relying on my mental image archive to hold the idea. I gather images from a lot of places, social, Pinterest, google, walking around, everything is up for reference.
For this project I pulled reference that consisted of mostly flat colors, organic objects, contrasty colors, along with prominent patterns. I discovered this one image that had this swirly, wavy object in the background (seen above) that I knew had to be apart of this illustration and created my own custom version of this idea. The shape is designed to emphasize the impending impact and power of the card coming down to crush someone’s dreams of winning the book. It needed to draw your attention immediately. It also made sense to add the LP&S icon (Spade in a box) in this space since i wanted to make that a focal point.
When I choosing colors there’s rarely a time where I use solid black. On its own its so stark that unless you match the intensity of its shade it will stand out in your piece. Usually, I choose to have the colors blend seamlessly with each other. Instead of black, I chose a dark green to play off the green background with enough contrast to provide separation between the two.
“At its core, Spades is communal. And that meant the design needed a strong rule set too.”
With a title like “Black Love Day,” I obviously chose red to be the featured color to emphasize the Valentine/Love aspect of the date. Normally, I like to avoid any on the nose decisions but the use of this color would be used more as highlight not the main draw. The red hand would live on a rich green background and use the darker green tinted black as its shadow.
Behind the card I placed the custom shape I mentioned earlier by taking its wavy circular strokes, merging them with a hand drawn circle then turning it into a single shape. As a solid curve in Affinity I can now drag any object into it to make it a clipping mask. This is how the gold energy appears behind the card. This same technique was applied to the brand name to create repetition in layout of the promotion.
With the illustration complete the promotion moved to its final stage and took a few different forms to find the right balance of information, overall layout, breathing room, scale of central image, visual rhythm and emotional clarity. With any project like this you have to manage assets, logos, fonts, and CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Position) to get the vision to a place where both you and the client are happy with the outcome.
The evolution of a project is hands down my favorite part of creating art. If you don’t properly plan, you’ll end up wandering around the concept hoping something sticks. By establishing rules early I created a solid foundation with clear parameters of where I could play, creating a container around the project that encourages experimentation without wandering. Play within the confines of the brief is the best place to create from.
This project was created entirely in Affinity.
