Illustrations for CMDC’s 11th “Birthday”

CMDC, the Creative Mornings chapter in Washington, D.C., commissioned my work for the 11th anniversary of the group. The fresh designs built up the brand and were used for merch at the “birthday party” event. I drew the designs digitally but mirrored the look of linocuts, and relied on imagery reminiscent of dc’s punk scene, per the creative direction of the CMDC lead.

CMDC is an artistic space that serves creatives, so I indulged creative liberty in the designs. I sought the intersections between the core values of creative mornings and the core values epitomized in the D.C. punk scene, which we chose as a more authentic representation of our city that the surface-level political or tourist imagery. I identified the center of the venn diagram as inclusivity, community, anti-establishment, DIY, and truth-telling. Visually, I grounded the concepts in coffee and artists’ tools, representative of the CMDC monthly artist lectures held over coffee.