The CABINET OF WONDERS :
LONDON Poster
After animating a video for Wesley Stace’s song “Goodbye Jane.” and advertising the California dates of his brilliant vaudeville show “Cabinet of Wonders” Wes invited me to revisit the California poster for his Cabinet shows in London. I couldn’t have been more excited to help!
As in its U.S. incarnation, the London Cabinet of Wonders would brings together a mix of musicians, writers, poets, and comedians. For the London shows, Wes enlisted Gavin Bryars, Jonathan Coe, Dave and Harry Hill, Neil Innes, Linda Lewis, Gary Louris (of The Jayhawks), Ian McEwan, and Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger. Pete Eves & The Manuals served as the house band.
While there would be a number of size variation for online and physical use, we kept the 12 x 24 inch format for the main poster that we’d first established for the California shows. It was nicely reminiscent of vintage concert posters, and the proportions ideally suited the elongated shape of the state of California. For the London show, I toyed with the idea of using the map of England in the same way, but England is a bit more squat than the state of California, and it seemed fundamentally wrong to crop off the entirety of Ireland.
The solution was simple: Focus on the fact that the show was making its first trip from the United States to Great Britain. I tilted the whole thing 90° counterclockwise and added a little bit of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, with a little star for Philadelphia as the point of departure and a big star for London as the destination. Add a night sky to symbolize the inevitable red eye flight, and presto! On the animated version that appeared on social media, I added a little dotted line moving from the new world back to the old:
The main typography—a modified version of Lubaline, designed by Maximiliano Sproviero and published by Lián Types—also made its first return appearance here. Since then, has made this lockup the official Cabinet of Wonder logo.
Finally, I produced an A3 version of the poster for local promotion at Bush Hall, and I’ll certainly not keep it from you here:
