Lansing Symphony Orchestra

For over a decade, the Lansing Symphony Orchestra showcases a variety of work through their annual season campaigns, one of which being the Pops series. During my time at Traction in 2018 and 2019, I had the opportunity to work on three of these campaigns including: their annual holiday showcase, a celebration of the Rat Pack, and the Magical Music of Harry Potter. Each campaign had its own unique identity, including custom illustrations and typography, designed to fit a wide variety of deliverables including posters, postcards, print and digital ads.

Holiday Pops

The Lansing Symphony Orchestra annual holiday pops series includes a wide variety of holiday tunes and traditional carols, bringing family and friends together as part of a community tradition. For this campaign, I chose to highlight the tradition of sending and receiving holiday cards through illustrating festive postage stamps. This campaign included posters, flyers, postcards, printed and digital advertisements and went on to win a Silver Addy award in the AAF Lansing chapter.

Rat Pack

In addition to the Holiday Pops series, Lansing Symphony Orchestra also had a series featuring music by the Rat Pack. When approached with this assignment, I knew I wanted to lean into the 50s and 60s era of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. The design for this campaign is greatly inspired by old-Vegas signage. The deliverables included posters, postcards, printed and digital advertisements.

Magical Music of Harry Potter

As a Harry Potter fan, this was a project I was more than excited to take on. There were several directions we could have gone in with countless sketches and ideas along the way. Ultimately I found the connection between the conductor's baton and the wand to be too great to pass up. Combining these parallels with the wonder and power of the Patronus charm, I chose to illustrate the baton revealing a patronus charm with the title of this series. Hidden throughout this illustration are a variety of music notes and Harry Potter symbols.

This was right around the time "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" was branded by Pentagram and I wanted to draw some inspiration from how they approached that design. This inspired some custom typography to really bring the entire aesthetic together. We ended up going through about 18 rounds of variations for the word "Magical" before adding in some dimensional details.

Project Highlights

Work completed at Traction Partners, LLC in Lansing, MI

Art Direction by Terry Sieting and Cameron Gnass

ADDY Award Recognition 2019

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Jersey Born, Philly Based
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @k.line_design

"It's supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great"— Jimmy Dugan, A League of Their Own, 1992