Postering on Haight Street, San Francisco

The first thing about rock posters, that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle on the internet, is that the real purpose of a poster is street advertising. Yes, it’s cool to share these poster as art pieces on Expressobeans.com or on Gigposters.com or here on my blog; but their primary reason for being is to be seen on the street and get people to go to the show.

When The Firehouse was commissioned by Goldenvoice to make a silkscreen series of posters for the Warfield and Regency theaters in September of 2008, my first thought was, “Let’s get all of these posters ON THE STREET!”

There are a lot of ways to grab a person’s attention through design. I’m not going to get into that too deeply right now. I’ll save that for another blog. There’s a bright attention grabber like the last poster for Clutch at the Regency; that’s a poster with a sparkly metallic motorcycle to shoot a strobe flash into your eyes. The attention-grabbing effect of using bold legible yellow and red type giving you the info in a blast.

My Glasvegas poster has a different strategy to get you to look. I consider the visual environment of the street, and design a poster which is different than the dominant colors you’ll find there. And you can see, this one pops out like a breath of fresh air.

Anyway, enjoy these pictures taken by my lovely girlfriend Nancy.  Have a tour of my neighborhood, follow me while I take along some scotch tape and we put some posters up on Haight Street. I’ll take you to my favorite stores along the way…

Here’s my girlfriend Nancy with my newest creation for Glasvegas (in front of the Haight Ashbury Post Office)

First store – Pipedreams – always greeted with applause for the newest poster-treat!

Next – Anubis Warpus – You can see Anubis supplies the graffiti community and gives me a cool street gallery in their window!

Distractions – the owner is a big collector of psychedelic art and has a fantastic collection of rock posters from The Firehouse going back for years on the ceiling of the store!

Escape From New York Pizza – free pizza for life! Now how’s that for incentive to make posters? You can see they have a gallery of Firehouse posters too.

Murios – with a poster-run complete, time to get a poster hung behind the bar in the best blacklight in town – and sit back, enjoy and have a beer. Hope you had a nice tour of my hood!