Stage North

• When You're Smiling — Tim Tamashiro Jazz Poster

• A jazz show only sells if the poster feels like the music — playful, warm, and impossible to scroll past.

• StageNorth booked jazz vocalist Tim Tamashiro for a night themed around "When You're Smiling," and needed a poster that would draw a general Slave Lake crowd, not just jazz fans. I had a $275 budget, one day to deliver, and a single photo of Tim to build the whole piece around.

• I worked in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, starting from Tim's expressive, hands-out photo and building the design around his energy instead of against it — literally routing the hand-lettered headline through his open hands so the type and the photo feel like one gesture. I scattered loose music notes and instrument doodles through the background to signal "jazz" instantly, and kept the palette warm and playful to match the tone of the show rather than going moody or formal, which is the easy default for jazz posters.

• The client was thrilled with the result and thanked me for the work — the poster ran as both the event poster and a newspaper ad.

• Micro-version: Designed a jazz concert poster around the performer's own gesture, turning a single photo into the whole headline.

Ad size: 6 columns x 15.5 "