I can't imagine true devastation; earth-shattering, world-destroying, life-ending devastation. It seems a far and foreign idea. Getting a glimpse at devastation is like getting a glimpse at the sun: it's too harsh to stare at, so instead I experience the sun through the sunlight in the world around me. Although I can't stare directly at devastation, I can see it's residual effect in photographs and stories, and for a blinking halfmoment I am almost able to comprehend what it would be like if everything I knew was crumbled by the earth's apathetic shudders. Then, in a fleeting moment, the idea is gone and I'm left with a silhouette of dread that I can't quite understand.
The weekend after the earthquakes in Haiti my close friend, Chris Golinski, asked me to help him raise money for the thousands of people in need. The silhouette of dread was fresh within him. He wanted to contribute his time and effort into helping his fellow man and decided to do it using what he knows best: drums. Chris proposed that we organize a drum festival and 100% of the proceeds to the Red Cross' International Relief Fund for Haiti. I agreed.
Of course, I don't know a thing about drums, nor do I know anything about drummers. What I could help with was planning, marketing, and design. Our minds were swirling cyclones of ideas and what-if's. When we met for the first time to discuss the feasibility of the festival our separate idea-cyclones converged into what would make the tornado in the movie Twister seem like a friendly ice cream truck passing through. (Okay, I'm exaggerating but I can at least safely say that Helen Hunt wouldn't have survived.) After several hours of frenzied discussion we had several ideas, diagrams, lists, and doodles that culminated into two huge grins as we shook hands for the night. It was possible, and we were going to make it happen.
Between the first and second meetings Chris managed to book five big name drummers. He also managed to find and book a venue for the event. It wasn't going to be held in a basement, garage, or local meeting hall but at the New Jersey School of Percussion! I was blown away. Chris had completely destroyed any doubts and low expectations that people may have had when he first suggested the festival. With the artist names and location confirmed we began designing the poster. After a day and a half of working together (and lots of Chinese food) the poster was finalized:
Designing it was a challenge because it's very different from posters I've done in the past. Previously, the posters I designed promoted an event or product in a hit-and-run fashion: Bam! Here it is! There you go! Hope you got my message! In other words, there wasn't a whole lot of information being delivered, or if there was it was clumped in one area (they were also a bit looser in terms of artistic style/expression). With Drummers for Haiti, however, we had to list the drummers and include mini bios for each, making them slightly separate entities.
Another difficulty with the poster was walking the line between respectful and edgy. The cause obviously calls for respect; we are trying to raise money for a natural disaster that killed thousands and razed the Haitian landscape. So there's absolutely no space for skulls, flames, and decaying typefaces which is what the majority of drum posters seem to be comprised of. I constructed a bridge between the two sides by using sedated tones and rough line at the inside of the border between the main content and the header/footer. This gave the poster a somber feel yet still provided some grit for aesthetics. Not one for completely geometric designs, I traced the drum in the background allowing the organic lines to distinguish it from the foreground's harsh lines and right angles. In the end, we had a poster that we both accepted and the next step was the website.
I am not a web designer. I don't try to be. For now, web design is something that I'm not investing my time in; there's still too much to learn in terms of print design, drawing, and writing. Still, we needed a site and unless Chris could bang one out with his drum sticks it was largely up to me to make it happen. With invaluable help, comments, and suggestions from Chris we completed the first draft of the site in one sitting (it was an all day marathon). We just needed to figure out how to get it online.
That's where Jay Desai comes in. He is a very close friend of Chris and I. We could trust him with our hard work (the web pages) and know it would be taken care of. Jay is a mechanical engineer who has never made a website, let alone publish it to the net. Still, within 48 hours of handing the pages over he had the site up and running. You can check it out here. There are still a few tweaks to be done, like making the page background gray and figuring out how to name the pages, but with such little time to get things going we've all come a long way.
Drummers for Haiti will take place February 28th in West Orange, NJ at the NJ School of Percussion. The donation is $15 to gain admission to five excellent drum clinics and have a chance to meet the clinicians. If you are unable to attend but would still like to support the cause please check out the donate page. As I said earlier, 100% of the proceeds go to Red Cross.
Rock on, visually and musically.
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