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Philly Beer Week

JUNE 18, 2011
Here is one of those stories where no good deed goes unpunished. Or is it "Every good deed goes unpublished......" Not to add insult to injury, we all strive to do the best we can, and sometimes........, sometimes they just take a nose dive off a cliff, yelling “Yaw’ll watch this!…” Reportedly the last words heard from a young Alabamian, diving off a 165 foot cliff….. As rescue workers strive to pull him from the water unconscious ,revive him and transfer him to a local hospital to be held for Psychiatric observation, the EMS drivers started wearing Tee shirts that say “We interfere with natural selection.”  Sometimes things just take a dive off the cliff into muddied waters.
I had this great cover for Philadelphia Weekly for Beer Week. What could possibly be better…well a budget ( They pay $300. I know the horror) , but besides that. I mean, you got Beer and a great art director that says just “Looking for something light and funny.”
my original vision for the cover

Thumbnails for Philly Mag © Bill Mayer 2011

I started with the normal forty thumbnails and She picked the most obvious direction. But keeping simple was really a good idea. I swung by the house to pick up some bottles of Beer to shoot for reference, for Foam, for color…. wanted to do this rather than searching Google, So Forest and I set up a little impromptu photo shoot that took about ten minutes. Now we are left with open bottles of beer at 9:03 in the morning. I have not drank a beer at 9:30 in the morning since spring break, Daytona Beach when I was 16 years old…. So, painfully, we poured the beer down the drain… yes, I know. The horror. You’ll get over it.
BEER reference for color and detail

 
I did this great little airbrush drawing of a dancing bottle of beer…. Tried it on black like I had originally envisioned but the white was so clean… I decided to leave it on white. Ioana wanted me to fill up the cover a little more so I distorted the beer and added a little spiral behind the mug he was holding. We added the Beer festival logo on the top Mug the beer was holding. Then we are off to Canada, the land of Beer. Where Rogers network makes it impossible to use your USA iPhone without racking up a $500 weekend phone bill. I went to the library in Brighton to check in Monday (Memorial Day) and found a letter from the Art Director about changes… Now they want to put the logo (Huge) on the main bottle. Shook Forest out of Holiday fun to take care of this pretty simple change and sent it off by early Tuesday. On reentering the U.S. Wednesday, and getting a cell signal again, rather than international roaming, I get another email apologizing for the additional changes to the design. “The client is convinced that the beer is drunk…”
tried it on black and white.... Philly Mag © Bill Mayer 2011

Forest's changes....Philadelphia Weekly © Bill Mayer 2011

The Beer is drunk? Wait a minute, the Beer is Drunk?  Yes the beer bottle looks drunk. and the client wants it straight on the page. Actually, Ioana did a great job redesigning the cover based on what she was handed. But THE BEER WAS DRUNK? Here is her note: “Dear Bill, I'm really sorry, but the cover ended being a disaster. The final decision was made by Beer Week, a huge advertisement client of Philadelphia Weekly. they insisted the bottle looked 'drunk' and wanted to have it straight. I didn't have much of a saying in this one, so I had to comply with their demands. The cover doesn't make any sense in the end and your work was totally destroyed. You will, of course get paid, but I wanted to apologize. It never happened before and hope will never happen again.”

The beer is drunk, I told Forest about this he said, “I thought that was the concept, right? A drunk, stumbling beer…”
Funny… I never saw it that way at all.
Philadelphia Weekly © Bill Mayer 2011

“We interfere with natural selection.” seems like a great moto for Ilustrators too
Topical: JUST WORK  
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