The Road to Fresh Meat: The Poster

One night a year at the end of April, cartooning students at SVA transform the school's dingy basement lounge into a buzzing marketplace.  The public is invited to browse, buy and barter for self-published comics by SVA's cartoonists. This is...

Fresh Meat is our annual tradition promoting the work and talent of our student body, and it needs your help! Like any convention, our comics fair is only as good as our attendance, through which students share their work with industry figures and get attention from the comics press. Long before the warmth of spring reaches our fair city,  SVA's halls need to be decorated with posters heralding this culmination of a school year's work, while local magazines require early submissions for the ads they'll be running to promote our event to the public. This is where you come in:

We're calling for art submissions for Fresh Meat 2012's ad campaign!

Check under the cut for submission requirements and examples of previous ads.

Got a snazzy idea for a poster or magazine ad? Follow these requirements and it might make the cut!

• Feature a prominent and legible "Fresh Meat" logo
• Clearly represent the idea of a self-published comics fair or play with the event name (we love visual puns)
• Leave space to include info about the event (to be added later)
• Poster dimensions: Art should fit Letter or Tabloid-sized paper
• Magazine ad dimensions: Magazines have been slow to give us specific dimensions, so you should leave your ad square-shaped and give room for potential cropping
• Avoid excessively obscene imagery
• Submit your ad as a 300 dpi TIFF file to cartoonallies (at) gmail (dot) com

What'll you get for submitting? Well, you'll be helping draw in a huge crowd for our department's biggest event of the year, potentially giving a jump-start to your career and your peers'. If your art is chosen for Fresh Meat's magazine ad, you'll be properly credited on the advertisement and your art will appear in a major publication such as the Village Voice!

And if you don't have time to put a poster together or you don't feel like you have the talent, we're going to need a dedicated street team to spread the posters far and wide once printed. If you're interested, send us an email!

If you've never been to Fresh Meat or need some ideas, check below for coverage from last year's event, as well as a few of our previous advertisements.

By Megan Brennan

By Michelle Nunnelly

By Hanh Nguyen