Civic Design

Sweet Pea Festival Poster Submission

Every summer in August, there's an arts festival in Bozeman, Montana. It began in 1906 and continued through 1916, after which it disappeared. Sixty years later the event was reborn and an open poster competition was added to inject energy into the festival and engage the arts community. In 1982, the open poster competition was adopted as a class project for a graphic design course I was enrolled in.

Fast forward to 2014 while sifting through project piles in my studio, I came across an old portfolio. I discovered a few scraps of my poster project from my 1982 studio class—a clear acetate camera-ready overlay with various rubylith shapes and white Plaka paint splatters, a piece of illustration board painted with a black texture and a large halftone dot floral image. After discovering these, I was inspired to design another poster for the Sweet Pea Festival, so thirty-four years later I started to research the history of the event. Besides my nostalgia for the project, my entry was an homage to Bozeman, one of my favorite towns, and reflected a renewed interest in a specific type of visual storytelling which began during undergraduate school. I also thought about how fun it would be to enter the competition so many years later. I didn't win.

You've arrived on a new landing page for Civic Design. The new site will include years of design projects that aren’t on my current site, stories of joy and horror from decades of specific projects and collaboration—a photo shoot with a skeptical dairy farmer in the middle of a fallow field for an international corporation, a week-long press check in Reykjavik, embarrassing interactions with rock-and-roll icons, as well as academic successes and failures.

In the meantime and until the new site is up, you can still poke the following links to get to my current sites site.civicdesignoffice.com and www.craigdavidsonart.com.