Illustrator Brad Yeo's Poster Art

The Artist

Brad Yeo is a Calgary-based illustrator who graduated from the Alberta College of Art in 1991. Yeo’s work has appeared in Harpers, the Wall Street Journal and Business Week. In March, Yeo beat out hundreds of entries when a poster he designed for The Military Museums of Calgary was awarded a gold medal in the advertising category by the New York-based Society of Illustrators, which hosts an annual awards competition to recognize top achievements in the field of illustration.

The Art

The Military Museums asked Yeo to design a poster to bring attention to its Founders’ Gallery, which opened in 2009 to display temporary exhibits of contemporary and traditional war art. Yeo’s poster, which was done in acrylic and later digitized for printing, had to blend these two aspects of the gallery. “In the illustration, it was very important to marry the idea of art and heritage,” Yeo says.

The Inspiration

“A lot of military-related art is very drab and has that typical military-looking palette,” says Yeo, who decided to avoid the use of greyish tones for bright, modern-looking colours. At the same time, Yeo continues, the poster needed to connect to military heritage, which it does with its styling, while also speaking to the contemporary element of the gallery through its usage of colour and broken-up, abstracted geometry.

As for the character in the poster, Yeo says the man was conceived of as a war artist, but could just as well be a regular serviceman writing in a journal. “The whole thing is really about an individual‘s story,” he says. “Whether it’s an artist writing in a journal or a war veteran, it’s about making a record, transferring that record and bringing it to us. It can be read both ways, and that was intentional.”

Yeo’s poster is now on temporary display at The Military Museums of Calgary. For more information, visit themilitarymuseums.ca or bradyeo.com.