Do you ever wonder who is responsible for creating music festival posters? There’s no need to guess who created the design for this year’s official Tin Pan South event. Watkins College of Art freshman Charlie Hartrich is the mastermind behind the poster for the popular annual songwriter’s festival held in Nashville.
The opportunity to create the poster first arose in Hartrich’s Illustration I class when his professor, Dan Brawner, assigned a project to the class. “Brawner is a real working illustrator and has many connections with people throughout the illustration world and just the Nashville area,” said Hartrich. “Part of this project was that we would work with the organizers of the Tin Pan South festival, and if they liked one of our designs they would possibly use it for the real festival.”
After a month of hard work, Hartrich designed a poster that caught the eye of the Tin Pan South organizers.
“When designing this poster I really wanted to focus on Songwriting more so than simply music or Nashville. I was inspired by the idea that songwriters across America are all part of this festival and I think that is what music is mostly about: bringing people together and encouraging empathy,” said Hartrich. “Music and the city are a part of one another here, so I also wanted to mix the two together and that drove most of the subject choices. But lastly, my main inspiration for my work was music itself. As a musician, music can be such a crazy, otherworldly thing and I tried to convey how expressive it can be in the poster although nothing beats the real thing.”
Read more about the Tin Pan South festival and Hartrich’s design here.
