Revisiting Fall River, Massachusetts

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Fall River Travel Poster

There’s a new artist trend happening lately, and quite frankly, I love it. Artists like Taylor Swift and The National are remastering and re-releasing updated versions of prior work. This practice got me thinking about revisiting work that I’ve released and needs updating.

Fall River: City on a Hill

The original “City on a Hill” Poster developed in 2012.

In 2012, I started seeing people create travel posters based on fictional places. At the same time, I fell in love with the Works Progress Administration style of artwork and loved how the US Government promoted visiting National Parks. I wanted to develop a WPA-styled poster that promoted my hometown, Fall River, Massachusetts. 

For me, I needed to create something that people from this city would be proud of and inspire people to think differently about this place. I didn’t know where to begin, and bought Adobe Illustrator and started to teach myself how to make vector images. It was a challenging process, but I fell in love with the software. Within a few months, I developed eight travel posters featuring Fall River and successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the series. 

Self Reflection

A side by side glance of the two posters.

City on a Hill 2.0

I printed 125 posters featuring the City on a Hill and sent all of them across the country. In 2016 I sent my last copy of that poster, but I never truly felt satisfied with the result. I honestly am surprised 125 people liked it enough to purchase it! 

Over the years, my Adobe Illustrator skills have grown significantly. I knew I had to redevelop this Fall River poster with my current skillset. One of the things I’ve been trying to develop is a core color palette, where all of my digital art reflects distinct and similar colors. ‘City on a Hill 2.0″ was a great experiment to test out my new palette. 

Finally, I can say I’m genuinely proud of this poster, and it finally completes the vision I had nine years ago.

The poster is now available in the shop if you’d like to display your own Fall River community pride. 

About the Author
About the Author

Drew Furtado is an Emmy Award winning filmmaker, and leader of a nationally recognized high school media arts communication department .

He develops guides and strategies for nonprofit and educational organizations to improve and grow their social media presence, website development, and communication practices that best engages audiences.

New Bedford, Massachusetts

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