After a few hectic pre-Spring Break weeks, a Spring Break, and crazy weeks upon returning, it’s been too long since I’ve posted. Thankfully, though, I haven’t stopped thinking or creating. My newest idea(s) have been inspired by my Spring Break adventure, into Austin, TX. I may do a separate post about the incredible typography in Austin, but that’ll be another day.
In this post I want to talk about Austin itself. It hadn’t been on my radar at all as a cool place to be until I met my current girlfriend. She has family over there, and had the idea to go there together for Spring Break. Fast-forward a few weeks and snow is covering the roads in and around my school. An hour before the state of Delaware was called into a state of emergency, and no cars were allowed on the road, M and I left. We got in my car and drove before it was too late, taking advantage of the snow day that Wednesday to speed toward better weather.
The weather was definitely better in Austin, but a nonstop 24-hour drive from Delaware was enough to drive both of us crazy. So, the first thing we did when we got there was take off our cold-weather clothes from Delaware and put on bathing suits to take a dip at Barton Springs. It was the most beautiful water I’ve seen in a while. Crystal clear water flowing in a huge man-made river made for awesome swimming, perfect diving, an adorable dog park, and incredible graffiti on concrete.
I won’t walk you through the whole vacation right now, so the short and the long of it is we went to all kinds of restaurants, hot spots, art exhibits, and brewery concerts. Everywhere I looked, I saw what Austin natives consider as weird. And weird it certainly is! In the best ways, though. Colorful people, diverse styles and cultures and ideas, people from all over the world just basking in the weirdness of Austin. One word stuck in my mind the whole time, but it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I knew why. That word was ostentatious.
While it could be perceived as a bad thing, I see ostentatious as something being as unique as it is noticeable; an expensive car covered in chrome gold paint, a throne, an outfit of neon colors. Ostentatious is big, it’s bold, it’s different, it’s weird. It’s not for everyone.
It’s Austin.
And that was the connection I made, when I said it out loud: “Austin-tatious.”
Immediately I had an idea of how I wanted that to look, and what I want it to say.
The more I played with the word Austin, the more I saw stuff that could be altered or played around with to make a point. And this got me thinking about creating an ad campaign for Austin, focused around the word Austin. Now, I can’t pretend to be an expert after only one visit, but I have a decent idea of what Austin is like. And I think this could be a fun way of expressing that!
So this is where my two ideas came from, and the picture above is a proof-of-concept of the first.
The fonts I have used here are Elegant and Sensational for “Austin” and Hoefler for “tatious.”
Thou Art 