Podcasts are the new punk rock, and listening to them while you work is pretty much universally acceptable since Covid-19. One that we listened to in the office and at home for years - before it broke our hearts by suddenly ending - was The Boogie Monster podcast, hosted by Dave Stone and Kyle Kinane (we still get our fix listening to The Stonebergs). Recently we had the opportunity to work on some promo artwork for Dave Stone's personal brand, based on an idea he had for a retro BBQ restaurant approach. Dave is an amazing cook, and hosts his own Patreon channel devoted mostly to cooking, food, stuff he's eaten recently - good, quality food is an important part of his life.

Using a mix of stock illustration, different typographic treatments in InDesign , a mid-century ish color palette that we turned up a few notches, and then weathering the final artwork to varying degrees in Photoshop, we came up with this restaurant art work that is meant to reflect the late 70's/early 80's, semi-mid century look and feel of what could be a small-town restaurant or big-city food destination. Some ambiguity there was important, after all that sign is way bigger in scale than it would be in real life, but that's the point of the artwork. This was a short, super-fun exercise that basically let us do what we want - which can sometimes make a project impossible, but was fantastic in this context.

However, even while working on this, we felt it was a little too big-city/west coast-sih for what Dave was going for, and he agreed. It needed to look more like a mom and pop style restaurant - less large signage, more small town, quirky building, one-off type of establishment. SO we went back to an earlier piece we had started then scrapped, to see if that could be made to better reflect what Dave had in mind.

The second piece was