I designed, illustrated and produced this Promotional/Commemorative Poster for the NYC Witches’ Annual Masquerade Ball 1996, A Benefit for People with AIDS.

This was the first project that I assembled entirely as a digital creation. The production of the posters was being donated to the ball, but the only way to make the very tight turnaround, piggybacking on another print run, was to sidestep the usual steps of a painting a traditional illustration, shooting, scanning, typesetting, composing mechanical artwork, and creating traditional optical color separations. By going all digital, I was able to cut the production time by more than 50%. The organizers were overjoyed with the results. The event raised several thousand dollars for the Cabrini Hospital AIDS Program.

Art Direction, Design, and Digital Illustration was performed using Photoshop, Quark Xpress, Logomotion/Infini-D and Illustrator. The project was made possible due to two specific advances in digital technology. The first was direct support in Photoshop for files in the CMYK color space used in commercial printing. Second was the advent of ZIP drives, a relatively inexpensive way of storing and moving larger files, carrying a whopping 50 to 100mb of data on floppy sized cartridges. Standard floppy disks of the ’90s only held a paltry 1.4mb.

In the age of gigabyte flash drives and broadband Internet connections for moving massive files to clients, printers and vendors, both storage technologies have since fallen, long forgotten, into the digital dustbin of history.