Working with Atlanta Freedom Bands (www.atlantafreedombands.com) is always a creative highlight of my year. Their concerts are ambitious, joyful, and deeply intentional — and the graphics that promote them need to match that energy. For their upcoming holiday concert, artistic director O’Shae D. Best and the Concert Band had a wonderful concept: Holiday Passport, a celebration of holiday music from around the world. The music takes the audience on a global journey, with pieces drawn from diverse cultural traditions and locations across the globe.
That concept handed me a natural creative direction, and I ran with it.
The Big Idea: Everything Inside a Snow Globe
For a show called Holiday Passport, the design needed something that could contain the whole world — literally. The one request the band’s marketing team had was for a large, luminous snow globe, and inside it lives a miniature panorama of the global landmarks and cultural touchstones represented in the concert’s music.
Look inside the globe and you’ll find a snow-capped mountain, a fairy-tale castle, a golden-domed mosque, a Hanukkah menorah glowing warm against the winter blue, the Home Alone house, colorful Kwanzaa vessels, pine trees dusted with snow, Santa’s sleigh and reindeer arcing across the starry interior sky, and of course KRAMPUS! It’s a world in miniature, festive and inclusive, a visual representation of the breadth of holiday traditions the music celebrates. The globe itself sits on a warm wood-toned base, surrounded by holiday greenery, pine cones, red ribbon, and gold ornaments. All the warmth of the season framing a window to the wider world.
Anchoring the composition at the bottom of the globe is the host for the evening, Taylor Alxndr, whose portrait appears in a circular frame that feels native to the design rather than added on top.
The color palette throughout is a rich, theatrical blue. Deep enough to feel cinematic and celebratory without losing warmth, with the Holiday Passport title in a sweeping red script that sits against the globe with just the right amount of drama.
From Poster to Campaign
The poster is always where I start. Get the poster right and the rest of the campaign has a foundation to build from.
Once the poster was locked in, I adapted the design across the full suite of promotional materials: a postcard for direct mail and in-hand distribution, a playbill / program cover for the evening itself, ads for print and digital placement, and social media assets sized and optimized for the platforms Atlanta Freedom Bands uses to reach their audience.
Each format required its own thinking. The postcard needed to carry the full visual impact of the poster in a smaller, more intimate format. The social media assets had to hold up at thumbnail scale while still communicating the event details clearly. All of it stays in the same visual world (the globe, the palette, the script title treatment) so that everywhere someone encounters the campaign, it feels like a cohesive, intentional identity for the show.
The Details
The concert is Saturday, December 19, 2026 at 7PM at the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center at Morehouse College, 900 West End Ave SW, Atlanta 30310. Tickets are $25 general admission, $20 for seniors, and $15 for students, available at AtlantaFreedomBands.com.
This is the kind of project that reminds me why concert graphics are some of the most rewarding design work there is. The brief is clear and the creative challenge is to make something that earns its place on a wall, in a mailbox, and on a screen. I think Holiday Passport does that. I hope to see you there.
