Make A Circle

Design Notes

One of the the great joys of a creative life is being friends with other creative people. Filmmakers Jen Bradwell and Todd Boekelheide called me while I was on a small PNW island, on vacation. They came to me in a design crisis, and what started as a helping out in a pinch became a wonderful experience in helping them with their brand and poster for their new documentary on childcare workers, Make A Circle. It's a beautiful film, urgent and generous and crucial and affecting.

Making a poster for a documentary is funny because, unlike fiction movies that usually have some kind of marketing b-roll or glamour photography to help sell the movie, like the documentarian filmmaker themselves, you are forced to improvise and be scrappy when it comes to resolution-appropriate captures and stills from a film that's already in the can. You just hope there are moments you can pull from that make up the whole.

In this case, I drew from my long history of supporting labor movements and my admirations from the graphica of past eras to craft a poster and identity.

Make A Circle will be available in the US nationwide on PBS affiliates, both streaming and terrestrial, thoughout 2025. Go watch it.