This art law event poster design needed to communicate a central idea about a complex subject: something essential has gone missing. The early sketches and design brainstorming with the editor-in-chief of the Chapman Law Review led to a photograph of a gilded picture frame–the kind you’d likely find in The National Portrait Gallery, which I shot in my office using a cheap 5×7″ gilded frame from an online retailer, touched up and tweaked in Photoshop to look like the real thing.

I put in a lot of research prior to the design process for symposia media and marketing materials. It needs to be said that it is not hard to fall down a rabbit hole researching art heists, and I most certainly did. It’s also one of the most surreal (often hysterically funny) rabbit holes you can travel, with well-documented gaffes, blunders and truly audacious thefts across the twentieth century (and before). However, it was this article in the New York Times, about the Gardner Museum heist in Boston, that gave the best clue about what to do with the background of the poster. The resulting visual pun for this art law event poster design is simple, direct and effective in its messaging.

The design for this poster translated easily across other event media forms, from flyers to social media cards. Keeping with the university’s brand colors, the graphic was eye-catching and immediately understandable and, quite likely, one of the reasons this was the best-attended event of its kind at the school in recent memory. The graphic was sufficiently striking that I used it again as an advertisement for the symposium on the back page of our faculty print publication, Jurist.