Cotton District Arts Festival

Peter Bain’s poster concept for the Cotton District Arts Festival in Starkville, Mississippi utilizes the modular nature of Glaser Stencil. The segments of this stenciled Futura variant were colored individually, in seven different tones. The palette is echoed in the striped image underneath, showing the fountain on University Dr/Maxwell St. in silhouette.

Milton Glaser’s typeface apparently lends itself to such colorful deconstruction, compare Tom Geismar’s New Year greeting card from 2003. For the fourth line, Bain switched to a single color per glyph – at this size, multi-colored letters would have flickered too much. The small line with the date is rendered in monochrome blue, and the even smaller venue info has to do without stencil bridges: it’s set in plain Futura.

See the realized posters from past years on the website of the Cotton District Arts Festival.