Band Stuff (Fall 2005 - Spring 2007)

Back during my first two years at Kenyon College, I played bass in a band called The Expert.  Don't ask for the history behind the name-- it was a really weird inside joke.  We were the most in-demand campus party band during our sophomore year, and we also had the most downloaded song on campus for a little while there with "Angeline."  Strangely enough, our myspace is still up and running even though the five of us haven't been in the same room together since graduation.  Enough history though.

While playing with The Expert, I had the honor of working with a violinist and graphic designer named Jeremy Sher who taught me how to use GiMP (imagine a poor man's photoshop) and taught me everything I know about stenciling.  Here's some of the stuff that we designed for the band:

We would flyer the campus with posters like these before every show, burning the edges for that Old West feel.  Jeremy showed me how to do the initial contrast adjustments, and we designed the posters from there, switching up the show information with each new gig.  These posters got a really positive reception around campus, and they would always find their way into dorm rooms after the shows.  Yep, we had the most stolen posters on campus.

Throughout our first year, we kept the slogan: "Five Freshmen.  One Incredibly Arrogant Band Name."  And the "five faces" graphic became pretty well known around campus.  Since I was working with all the proofs of the posters, I wound up with a lot of scrapped versions, so I cut them up and made a decoupage/montage version on my closet door.

 The "five faces" graphic showed up in a lot of places, and one of these included my own bass case.  Yep, I got bored one day and spraypainted the band onto my case, and we would usually display the case prominently during shows.  When the band split up, I covered the case in bumper stickers so as to avoid confusion, but for a while there, I was a walking advertisement for us.

One of several official versions of the "five faces" logo that Jeremy and I put together.  Jeremy was a little handier with overspray techniques than I was, and I'm pretty sure that this one was his.  Still, teamwork, so I'm posting it here.

 This is some of my earliest solo computerized graphic design work, and we ultimately didn't use this logo as anything except something we could keep on our facebook pages.  Note my horrible haircut and freshman fifteen.

Since we weren't freshmen anymore in Fall 2006, we needed a new slogan and a new logo, and this was what we ultimately decided on.  Sure, the lowercase E logo is a little pretentious, but the posters were still well received around campus (something which I assess by their continual abduction).

Lastly, this image is based on a photo of me that my friend Mike Schaeffer took at our band's last show (Summer Send-Off 2007).  I took the image and played around with it and got this.  Sure, my photo manipulation skills were still nowhere near professional, but it was still an awesome facebook photo for a while.

The Expert split up sometime after that concert to allow a few of our members to devote more attention to other groups.  In particular, our keyboardist, Nick Petricca, has gone on to much success with his group Walk the Moon, who are currently touring and recording.  I still reflect on my experiences with The Expert as two years that drastically improved both my bass playing and my artwork.