AS A teenager in small-town Wisconsin, poster artist Jason Munn was the bane of music promoters’ existence. An art and music obsessive, he’d spend evenings helping himself to band posters from walls around town.

“I used to get so excited by band posters when I was growing up,” says Munn, now 34 and designing posters for alternative rock’s most famous names.

“When I started making them I wanted to have that same effect on other people.”

That Munn has achieved his goal is clear. By turns vibrant and austere, his promotional posters for performers from pop-folk band Beirut to multi-instrumental singer Beck have brought him an international following.

One fan is Massey University design tutor Matt Clapham, who organised Munn’s visit to Wellington for the university’s annual Blow Creative Festival.

As well as setting up an exhibition of his work – at 161 Tory St until November 21 – Munn gave a public lecture to discuss his working methods and inspirations.

His career as a screenprinting artist began in 2002, when he moved to Oakland, California, and began producing silkscreen posters for short-lived music venue The Ramp, a cramped basement space beneath a church in neighbouring Berkeley.

Then, just a year after his arrival in Oakland, he decided to go for broke and found his own design studio, The Small Stakes.

The name, from a song by Texan band Spoon, was fitting. Initially the bedroom he and his wife shared doubled as the company’s office; shipping and receiving was run out of their kitchen. But he says he learned some valuable business lessons in those early days.

“For one, don’t try to dry your posters on the floor if you have a cat.”

He now works out of a slightly larger apartment, with a spare room for work, but his requirements remain modest: pen and paper for sketching, a Mac equipped with Illustrator – and a stereo.

Music is the jumping-off point for all Munn’s work. Once he has a commission, he spends up to a week brainstorming ideas based around any and all aspects of the band’s work, from live performances to lyrics.

“In my earlier work, I used lyrics a lot to give me a creative jumpstart. Every once in a while something really pops out at me and I’ll see a visual when I hear it.

“For example, there’s a poster in the exhibit for the band Why?. One of their songs has a lyric ‘snakes set to strangle’ and I pictured a coiling snake, which became the grooves of a record.”

He says it doesn’t bother him if people fail to get the reference.

“If the image is intriguing enough, it doesn’t really matter. Someone could have the poster on their wall for two years, start listening to that band more, and all of a sudden it could click, ‘oh, that’s funny’.”

In recent years Munn’s work has become less illustrative. These days inspiration comes as much from his personal response to music as from a single lyrical image.

This change in approach is producing more strongly abstract images, quite unlike the mid-century modern aesthetic that had been his calling card.

“The posters I did for [art rock band] Deerhunter recently made me really uncomfortable,” he says. “I kept looking at them and thinking ‘this isn’t me’, but I liked it. I liked that I created an image that looked like they sound.

“I want my work to be mine, but it also needs to be representational of the band. I just did a poster for Dirty Projectors and it’s really abstract for me – it’s nothing. And that’s the way I view that band. They’re so deconstructed and chopped up that I can’t pin an image on them.

“You know, I’m still not sure if I like that poster or not, because it really does make me uncomfortable. It looks like one of those images where you’re supposed to see something there – but there isn’t anything there.”

He says he reads a lot of interviews before he begins a project, as a way of ensuring he and the band are on the same wavelength.

But occasionally, he admits, he gets it wrong. A poster he produced for Sonic Youth was rejected by the band, who felt they’d outgrown the stark, distorted design Munn had produced.

“I wanted to do something that referenced their past, but they said no. They told me they wanted something like the rest of my work.”

A brightly coloured image influenced by the artwork for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo met with a warmer reception from the alternative rock legends.

Munn says the man responsible for Vertigo’s iconic spiralling circles, legendary graphic designer Saul Bass, is a personal hero.

“When you see his work, you see there was an idea first before he began work on it. I like that it’s so simple you can sketch it out, but if you had to describe to someone why it’s so special, you just couldn’t.

“A lot of stuff these days is so computer-generated and looks like someone just hopped on a computer and started making stuff. It’s just decorative. It doesn’t stay in your brain.”

He sees his own work as filling something of a void left by the demise of the record cover.

“I’ve always thought that art and music go hand in hand. When you’re just listening to music on the internet and iTunes, there’s definitely something missing.”

Munn has tried his hand at a few album covers of his own, but says music industry economics is making it harder for him to justify the effort.

“It’s really hard for an independent label to throw money at a record cover when they know that everyone’s going to get the album online. They’ll offer you just a couple of hundred bucks, which makes it hard to do.”

Still, Munn is keen to broaden his horizons beyond the music industry. His work has appeared in Wired magazine and features on publicity material for book publisher Chronicle.

And with 16 of his pieces now part of the permanent collection of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, he’s starting to allow himself more artistic freedom.

“I have friends in the art world, and they’re always pushing me to do more abstract stuff. I do think in future a mixture of the two could be nice.

“But I’m not tired of doing band posters at all.”