As part of an ongoing series of creative salons featuring people and work we find inspiring, our agency hosted acclaimed musician Andrew Bird in December 2010. Our assignment was to create a poster announcing his visit to agency employees.

Among the auto-tuned and formulaic songs of today, Andrew Bird’s music stands out as genuine and even a little old-fashioned. For the poster, we developed a visual analogy: Our world before the clutter and chaos of modern life took over. Inspiration for the illustration’s composition and framing came from Bird’s storybook narratives. The final design pictures our office amid a grove of trees instead of a forest of skyscrapers. The scene was painted in watercolour and then scanned digitally in a nod to Andrew’s production style, in which live instrumentation is looped and multi-tracked to create, multi-layered, complex works.

The event was well-attended and received good coverage from the local press.