Behind the Work: How I Illustrated the Official GABF 2025 Beer Festival Poster
When the Great American Beer Festival commission landed in my inbox, it felt like someone handed me a golden ticket and said, "Go wild."
This year, they were right to trust me.
GABF 2025 turned into one of the most intricate, layered, chaos-filled beer poster illustration I have produced. And not only that, but I was there… in Denver, Colorado… to hold it in my hands at the festival with the art director who helped make it happen. I nearly wept (The IPA helped).
The Brief: Deceptively Simple, Wildly Complicated
The ask was this: capture the entire spirit of American craft brewing in a single poster.
That sounds clean. That sounds manageable. That is, in fact, a beautiful lie.
The Great American Beer Festival is the Woodstock of beer. It's where the entire craft brewing universe descends on Denver every year in a glorious, foamy, obsessively detailed celebration of what happens when human beings decide that making liquid bread is a life purpose. My job was to make a poster worthy of that chaos.
No pressure.
The Process: From Sketch to Poster Glory
Great gig poster illustration always starts the same way: you stare at a blank page, panic quietly, and then start drawing tiny weird things until it becomes something magnificent.
For the GABF 2025 poster, the art director and I went through multiple rounds of sketches before we landed on the final composition. The challenge with any large-scale event poster illustration like this is that it has to work at two distances: overwhelming and immersive when you're close, and instantly readable as a graphic object from across the room.
We landed on a densely layered panoramic design that pulls the viewer into the world of craft beer — with characters, brewing equipment, hop vines, grain towers, and more Easter eggs than a Pixar film. Every element was intentional. Every corner has a story. And the best part was we’d separate the characters and use them for publicity and animation purposes.
The final artwork went through a few revision rounds. Which is exactly how it should be. The best commercial illustration work is never a first draft.
Being at GABF: The Moment the Poster Became Real
Here's the thing about illustrating an event poster: you spend months building this world in isolation, just you and the screen, and then one day it becomes a physical object that exists in the world.
Standing in Denver at the Great American Beer Festival, holding the finished poster with the art director… that's the moment. That's why you do this.
The poster was everywhere. Thousands of people were looking at a piece of art that I made, holding a beer, probably arguing about which hop variety is underrated. (It's Mosaic. Fight me.)
If you have never been to GABF, put it on your list. It is the single greatest gathering of craft beer, community, and absolutely unhinged creativity I have ever attended. And now I've illustrated it. Life goal: achieved.
What This Project Means for Art Directors
If you're an art director looking for a commercial illustrator for a large-scale event poster, festival art, or brand campaign… here's what the GABF project demonstrates:
I work directly with art directors and creative teams from concept through final delivery. I can handle complexity, layered compositions, and the kind of wildly detailed illustration that makes people stop scrolling. I've done it for Dead & Company, Major League Soccer, Lush Cosmetics, the New York Times, and now the Great American Beer Festival.
The work is always on time.
Let's Make Something Unforgettable
Ready to hire a commercial illustrator for your next event poster, brand campaign, packaging project, or just something delightfully unhinged?
And if you want to follow along for more behind-the-scenes breakdowns of how gig poster illustration, brand work, and editorial art actually gets made… welcome to my Journal. I'll be here, drawing tiny things and drinking good… no great craft beer.
— Daniel Sulzberg / Danvillage
