Jeff Tweedy, San Francisco Poster

We’re excited to share our latest poster for Jeff Tweedy for his recent (SOLD OUT) show in one of our favorite cities – San Francisco, California. Based on the rough sketch below (originally created for Wilco), we got approval from management to move forward with finalizing artwork + design.

From the beginning we wanted this one to be a big nod to San Francisco’s poster history, with large halftone dots, similar color palette, overprint effects and typography (ala Milton Glaser’s famous Dylan poster). You can see some of the posters that inspired us in the following article and in the gallery below.

This great article on the poster scene in San Francisco circa 1960’s “When Art Rocked: San Francisco Music Posters, 1966-1971″, is a really enjoyable read all about the era and the craftsmanship required from pressman and artists alike.   A quote that sounds like it could be talking about the present live music era, “The sheer number of concerts held during those years created an enormous demand for eye-catching graphic art.” One of the printers featured in the article, Tea Lautrec, also printed Bill Graham concert posters throughout the 1970s, for shows headlined by the likes of the Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, and the Grateful Dead.

Our poster was masterfully printed by Justin Dickau, who owns & operates Fairweather Press in Oregon. Justin reminds us of the kind of printer described in the above article: “In the end, though, everything came down to the pressman’s relationship with the artist. “My father loved what he did, he was a teacher. He really liked working with the artists. He would come home energized by what he had been doing all day long. He liked to help people figure out how to get what they wanted. Frankly, he did stuff that no printer would do nowadays.”

We truly appreciate printers that are willing to be a collaborator in the process – checking color separations, making suggestions, having an eye for detail that is sometimes lacking in the screen printing industry, either due to deadlines and sheer volume of work or just not caring enough.

Thanks to Justin for getting some great process photos for this one! We hope you enjoy the image galleries below (complete with alternative versions presented)! Get yours here in the shop, very limited amounts available.