Here’s a fun project I was asked to design for a special Argentine Tango event on New Year’s Eve here in Portland, Oregon. The event title dictated the entire theme of the event, so it also dictated my design direction. I worked with the event coordinator to create the color palette, conferred about typography, and then I was off and running.

A couple of challenges (and solutions):

1. They wanted both 8.5″ x 11″ color posters and an 8.5″ x 5.5″ greyscale version of the poster to use as handouts at tango events prior to New Year’s Eve; this posed the problem of trying to fit the original content into half the space. So when designing the larger poster, I tried to create elements that could be easily resized for the smaller handout, and also fiddled a bit with the color settings to ensure strong enough contrast in the greyscale version.
2. Very tight budget for printing, so we decided to print the color posters with a narrow white margin, rather than full-bleed; we took the final PDF file to FedEx/Kinko’s to print on one of their self-service machines, which enabled us to easily print more as needed. The greyscale handouts were printed on a home laser printer.