The Road Less Traveled takes its inspiration from American folk tunes from the likes of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. I worked with Fletcher C. Johnson to write the song. Fletcher and I sat down and I gave him some general direction. I knew I wanted the song to be about an ophan/misfit kid from Appalachia that travels around playing songs and leaves his home town to explore the world. I also liked the Seeger/Guthrie idea of the banjo/guitar as a weapon for social change to bring about a new way of thinking.

I have been really into the typographic work of Ed Ruscha and inspired by the typography that appears on old fruit crate labels. Both have a very "American" feel to me just like the song. I decided that I wanted the actual words of the song to be the hero of the piece and set about sketching out different words.

I decided to draw all of the type in Illustrator so that I could more easily break the type apart and animate it later. Needless to say its not easy to make dimensional type in Illustrator and even harder to make all of them look good. After a few months of work I had drawn all the words and started to design the overall look of the piece. The end product for the Road Less Traveled is a 3 minute video of the song using the graphic components below. Along with the video I also printed 9 postcards as mementos for the piece.

Below are links to download the song and video. You can also check all of the postcards and the original wall composition in Flash. I hope you enjoy The Road Less Traveled. Its been a long journey.