Notes From the Piano (pt. 3)
This blog post is the third installment of Notes From the Piano, a series of blog posts about the annual Robert B. Beardsley Piano Competition. To start from the beginning, click here.
While finding judges is always a pleasure, the best part of the preparation process is listening to the performers themselves. Of course, we won’t get any performers without proper marketing. Central to this is, not surprisingly…The Poster…’oster…’ster…. (Big, booming echo implied at this point.)
I’m happy to say that I took on the task of designing the first poster for the Beardsley Prize, with a lot of help from our resident expert in graphic arts, Carolyn Bonanno. She taught me the basics of layout and design, thus allowing me to run with this process in subsequent years.
Actually, it’s not all that challenging, particularly since we used the same image as the backdrop for the first three years. The original poster featured a diffused photo of the Beardsley Cup itself, selected from the couple dozen shots I took in Ruthmere’s Reception Room. The tricky part was not in selecting the best picture, but in making it soft enough so that the overlying lettering would be legible over the silvers and grays of the black-and-white image. That took several attempts. Shadows in the picture have a tendency to swallow up smaller type.
But we didn’t want the poster to scream at people either. Nothing is more obnoxious than those TV commercials where some lunatic goes over the precipice of good salesmanship by bellowing bombastic statements at you. “Our prices are CRAAAAAZYYYYY!!!” No, thank you. Dignity in all things, children. Dignity and poise. So I had to strike a balance between big, bold lettering and a clear background image. Don’t worry, it happened.
For this year, however, I decided to change it up a bit. Instead of the cup again, I went for something a little more obvious—a piano keyboard swishing its merry way softly into the distance. OK, blatantly obvious. No point in being too subtle when it comes to advertising. It may not be screaming in your face, but it still has to convey a clear message.
Yes, I know that’s what the words are for. And the words have barely changed since last year. The tricky part is, of course, the shading of the image. What colors are there on a standard piano keyboard? That’s right, black and white! And black has a tendency to be noticeably darker than white. Funny, that. Anyway, this involved another trial and error process of fading and shading until I got the image just where I wanted it. Not easy, either. Too soft and the white keys vanish. Too bold and the black keys eat the words again. Fortunately, Microsoft Publisher comes with a variety of settings to manipulate your image any one of a couple dozen ways. Black becomes graphite gray, white slides into silver. Dark Ruthmere red lettering stands out wonderfully. See for yourself.
The next step is to send it off to the printer. We needed 101 copies made. One-hundred to mail to schools and one for my office wall. We mailed them to schools throughout Indiana and the surrounding states in early February. We’ve already had a few inquiries, but no entries yet. They usually trickle in over the summer until around mid-July when things get positively Noachian (it’s a word—look it up). Good thing I like water.
