This poster for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival employs a strategic vector-based image trace workflow to transform a high-contrast photograph of a trumpeter performing before a massive crowd into a bold, five-color silkscreen-inspired illustration. Initial color grading in Photoshop established a harmonious palette of deep indigos, warm maroons, and vibrant corals, ensuring visual cohesion and brand alignment with the festival’s energetic identity. In Illustrator, a high-fidelity Image Trace preset reduced the composition to five flat vector shapes, preserving recognizable silhouettes while introducing stylized negative space—most notably the expansive sky, which serves as a typographic canvas for the oversized “JAZZ” lockup in reversed-out white. Secondary text (“& Heritage Festival”) is contour-fitted along the inner stroke of the terminal “Z,” activating otherwise dormant negative space and reinforcing hierarchy. A diagonal baseline at the lower third echoes the crowd barricade’s angle, anchoring a modular information block containing event details, a scannable QR code, and the festival URL. The New Orleans skyline silhouette wraps the poster’s perimeter as a continuous bleed element, contrasting the primary color fields and grounding the composition in geographic context. Centrally, the official Jazz & Heritage Festival logo is die-cut into the musician’s shirt, achieving brand integration without competing with the primary focal point. The result is a scalable, print-ready vector poster that balances photographic energy with graphic clarity, ideal for both digital portfolios and large-format festival signage.
