KPU instructor creates poster series for The Tragically Hip
The artwork depicts scenes from the band’s songs and showcases communities across Canada
KPU instructor John Belisle stands in front of the posters he designed representing songs from The Tragically Hip. (Submitted)
Kwantlen Polytechnic University Wilson School of Design instructor John Belisle created seven travel posters for Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip, featuring different communities and elements mentioned in their songs.
Belisle and his partner Adam Rogers came up with an idea for Mitchell Press, a digital printing company he has been working for 10 years.
“Mitchell Press hires me to come up with interesting projects every year, and because they’re a printing press, they want to have something that they can print that’s different than some other corporate work,” Belisle says.
Sharing a love for The Tragically Hip and Canadian vintage posters, Belisle and Rogers decided to merge the two together and create posters that would show Canadian communities the band mentions in their songs.
“There is probably like 20 songs where they mentioned different Canadian towns and communities, but we wanted it to be based all the way across Canada,” says Belisle, adding that a lot of songs mentioned specifically Ontario as this is where the group is from, but they managed to find seven different locations from across Canada.
Belisle says the idea was to make posters that will also say something about the chosen communities while visually showing other elements the band wrote about.
The poster “Thompson Girl,” for example, depicts blue icy waters with a polar bear, reflecting a scene from the song with the same name. The song mentions the town of Churchill in Manitoba, so the poster includes text suggesting places to visit in Churchill.
“We tried to [find] balance … [so that] The Tragically Hip fans would recognize the images in the poster, but we still wanted to capture the community as well,” Belisle says.
Doing a lot of research about the communities and combining it with song themes was something that challenged the designers.
“The biggest thing was trying to juggle what’s in the songs versus what’s in the community and then bring those two things together,” Belisle says. “So it was a lot of research into the communities themselves because there are two paragraphs on every poster that talk about all the interesting things you can do in those communities.”
Belisle believes the posters were received well by fans, adding that working on the project was an opportunity to reimagine The Tragically Hip’s songs in a visual way and to show them from a designer’s unique perspective.
“[The Tragically Hip] have lots of posters from their shows, but I think we’re the first ones that have ever come along and said, ‘This is what your songs look like to us,’” he says. “So, I think … we’ve had some pretty good response, and the posters are selling pretty well.”
Belisle says he is honoured that the band liked his and Rogers’ work, and the project was enjoyable as Mitchell Press allowed them to come up with their own idea and use their imagination.
“I do a lot of corporate design work and my clients are great, but it takes on another sort of meaning when you’re doing work for a band that you’ve listened to all your life and you’ve followed them from the beginning, and then, all of a sudden, they’re your client,” Belisle says. “So, it definitely changes your perspective and your appreciation for the band itself.”
