Visit Colorado Springs, the city's visitors bureau, works hard not only to help spread the word about everything to do in our city to tourists and locals alike, but also to launch multiple campaigns year-round to help local businesses get a moment in the spotlight. My favorite of these campaigns, because it's the one I get to create awesome stuff for, is the Crafts and Drafts Drink Passport. VCOS partners with local breweries, coffee shops, wine bars, and distilleries to offer killer discounts as well as a chance to earn rewards when you check out new spots.

For 2023, we chose to showcase some classic creeps with the Crafts, Drafts, & Cryptids campaign. To ensure that this campaign stood out at local watering holes, I centered the artwork around some of pop culture's favorite cryptids, with illustrations inspired by the pulp horror comics of the 1970s. And, of course, plenty of dramatic and cheesy comic book dialogue in the copy, as well as some actual information to help our intrepid explorers get started on their deal-hunting journey.

Since we were going to be slapping this creative on everything from posters to email headers, I created four illustrations that could work as the main focus of an ad or be broken down into individual elements, to use where a full-blown illustrated cryptid encounter would be too busy. In those smaller pieces, like digital ads and social media images, I used a collage layout where I ‘cut and pasted’ elements from the full illustrations along with some layered paper textures.