Brand · 2022
Bill Cole & the Untempered Ensemble
Three competition-selected poster designs for Bill Cole & the Untempered Ensemble's residency at UVA — three takes on the same evening of music, won through a campus-wide design competition.
Methods
Competitive Audit
The problem
How do you give one residency three different visual entry points without diluting the story? The answer turned out to be in the music itself: improvisation as architecture, not chaos.
Poster designs for Bill Cole & the Untempered Ensemble’s residency at the University of Virginia, Fall 2022. The final design was selected through a campus-wide design competition; I produced three companion variations as the chosen submission.
The three takes
Each poster handles the same fixed information — performer, dates, venue — under a different visual rhythm. The constraint was finding three executions that read as the same body of work without repeating the same idea.
Decisions
- Three takes that share a body of work, not three pitches. Variation wasn’t the goal — unity under variation was. Each poster carries a different visual rhythm so the trio could hang together without one canceling out the next.
- Improvisation as architecture. Bill Cole’s music gave the brief its frame. Rather than treat improvisation as visual noise (loose hands, abstract gestures), I let it set the structural logic — three disciplined takes built from the same compositional rules.
