A24 creative director Liam Hamill embraces brainrot with his monthly music venue posters

Ireland-born and NYC-based Liam Hamill has a pretty ace job, he’s the associate creative director at A24 and it’s no surprise how he got there. He was a designer at Pentagram from 2020 to 2022 and was also a design lead at Wieden+Kennedy. Everyone knows A24, but that’s largely because the stellar posters, motion design and eccentric campaigns the famous studio creates for its hit films are designed by people like Liam. He’s always had a side project or two on the go, but the more he directs, the less he designs, so he finds it necessary to get stuck into personal jobs. That arrived with Baby’s All Right, a bar, eatery and music venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“Baby’s has these old phone booths outside the venue that have ad boxes. Since phone booths are not maintained by the city anymore, they decided to use them to showcase their lineup for each month,” says Liam. “The only brief I was given is ‘Babys is a feeling.’” So, Liam’s objective is to represent a feeling – of Baby’s, of that particular month, of smart design. Inspired by the likes of the jester-like Richard Turley (as well as Frank DeRose at Wieden+Kennedy and Zoe Beyer at A24), Liam continuously finds new ways to represent his posters, if that’s an entire line-up condensed down to a microscopic grain of rice or a Spirit costume retailer and Halloween-inspired October poster.

Across A24’s promotional materials, you can see Liam’s fingerprints all over low-polygon imagery and arcade cabinets created for The Smashing Machine or something as ridiculous as a Palace Skateboards and McDonald’s collaboration. In these posters, you can see the same playfulness and out-the-box thinking.

Utilising the aesthetics of Wikipedia’s web design, the corny-cliche of Comic Sans and meme-imagery to bring Baby’s into the modern day, one could assume he’s satirising poster culture. But, Liams says: “I’m not sure there is such a thing as poster culture at the moment to be honest. Keeping in mind that pretty much all design is ephemeral and fun, I want the Baby’s posters to feel like a wink. I’d rather they make someone smile than be admired as formally ‘well-designed’.” Liam’s biggest inspiration? Walking around New York City with his head buried in Instagram reels, soaking in levels of stimulation that is either brain-destroying or helping him access upper echelons of his consciousness like Bradley Cooper in Limitless. In short, Liam’s work either cuts the bullshit or maximises it. That’s what makes each monthly poster so hotly anticipated.