I was recently asked to design the logo for San Antonio’s first-ever Big Spill Music Festival, an 11-day event featuring bands taking a break from playing SXSW shows in Austin. The line-up this year has some cool names on it, such as Best Coast, Big Freedia, The Coathangers, The Spinto Band, Agent Ribbons (from Austin), and The Tontons (from Houston). There is also a handful of local bands on the bill as well. Should be a good time …

A friend sent me a link to this article from brainpickings.org (ew?) which is all about artistic swipes — many of which have been lovingly collected into a comprehensive Flickr set called Similarities, curated by Bob Caruthers, a retired Professor of Graphic Design at West Texas A&M University (woo! Texas!). I spent a good bit of my day looking through everything, and saw a ton of gig posters I recognized but had no idea were directly (or indirectly) inspired (or “inspired”) by other, older art. (The Okkervil River poster above is an example.) I think “swipes” can be fun when they add to the conversation, but not when they just rip off the source material wholesale. As a cover designer, sometimes I appropriate well-known imagery to help get my point across faster, like in my 2007 homage to Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground and Nico sleeve art. Anyway, I recommend checking out the Flickr page, it’s full of cool (and highly swipe-able) stuff.

I stumbled on the link to Reelizer from a movie/geek website Badass Digest (new home to my favorite CHUD ex-pat writer Devin Faraci), and wow! What an explosion of eye-candy in poster form. I particularly love the two posters above by Arian Behzadi (check out his flickr site — awesome stuff), and those are just on the first page alone! Keep an eye out for the BAFTA movie poster series, which are excellent, as usual.