Update: If you’re looking to purchase the print it is now available here: studio.iso50.com
Ghostly International (the label I record for as Tycho) asked me to design a commemorative poster for their 10th anniversary concert series. This is the first print in a series I created for the events. The others will be released over the coming week with the flyer hopefully coming tomorrow. This print will be available soon as a limited edition large-format Giclee; pricing and availability will be announced next week. If you would like to reserve a print please contact studio [at] iso50 [dot] com.
The next poster will be the individual design for the upcoming Chicago 10 Year show where I’ll be playing a Tycho set along with Solvent, Kill Memory Crash, and Dark Party. More information is here.
This first poster lists all the Ghostly 10 year show cities: San Francisco
Los Angeles
Detroit
Toronto
New York
Barcelona
Moscow
Berlin Chicago
London
Film the Blanks is an ongoing design experiment that takes existing film posters and abstracts them down to their core elements. The project has garnered much press over the last few months, and I figured I’d post up some of my favorite pieces. I like the work because of the visuals, but there is also a strong participatory component that sets it apart. Each time a “blank” is uploaded to the site, users are invited to guess which film the abstraction represents. In some cases the solution is obvious, but it’s often remarkably difficult to discern which poster is hiding behind the blocks. Eventually clues are released and points are awarded to the successful guessers. It’s an exciting format for a design project; one that takes a strong concept, built around a fairly standard medium (poster), and twists it into something unique and engaging.
UPDATE: Comments are closed, we’ll be picking a winner today. Thank you to everyone who entered!
To Inform & Delight is a new documentary about the life and work of Milton Glaser. It’s currently playing in San Francisco, at the Roxie Theater, and will be in other selected US cities this summer. Further info on the site.
In support of the film, we are doing a giveaway of a couple signed posters and Glaser’s new book Drawing is Thinking. The grand prize will be onehand-signed (by Mr. Glaser himself) film poster and one copy of the book (displayed above). The runner up will receive onehand-signed (by Mr. Glaser himself) film poster. To enter, just comment on this post and be sure to leave your email address so that we can contact you if you win (email will not be publicly visible). The winners will be chosen at random from the comments on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009. Click here to enter!
If you’re in the San Francisco area, make sure to get out to the Roxie and catch this before it’s gone. It will be showing through the 25th of June. Also worth checking out is the Hilman Curtis short film on Glaser if you haven’t already.
I’ve been working on a new poster over the past week and it’s very near completion. It’s a limited edition for the August Ghostly 10 Year show Chicago installment. If you follow me on Twitter you’ve probably seen a sneak preview of the poster (the image above is a cropped snippet). The one up on the Ghostly site is a very early draft though, we just needed to get something up as a placeholder while I worked out the final version. There will be two versions: one with the artist names and one without. Bot will be available in large format offset and Giclee in the coming weeks. I’m hoping to post up the finals very soon here, could be as early as tomorrow but might hold off until Monday to make sure everything is dialed in.
I’ve been focusing a lot on music lately so this has been a nice chance to get back into design for a little bit. It’s definitely been a challenge wrapping it up though. I feel like the older I get the harder it is to decide when a project is complete; I just want to keep going through every possible permutation and variation until the finished product presents itself to me. For this particular poster I’ve been finding success in bouncing the different versions off of friends to see how they react. I’m still not sure if that’s the best idea, but it seemed to work this time around and it probably cut down a lot of the time I would have spent second guessing myself. Stay tuned for the final versions…
So we’re finally in Toronto for the final Ghostly show tomorrow. The Drake Hotel has put us up in the Artist Apartments next door which actually have internet, which has been a rare commodity on this trip. Sam and I were sitting here looking through his favorite saved images and he pulled up the Peter Saville designed New Order poster above. So nice, I looked it up and found this other FAC88 poster — reminds me a lot of this. The top one is all you Alex.
Poster Cabaret’s collection of prints is a great resource if you’re looking for inspiration or just something nice for the wall. Sign me up for every Jason Munn print. I really do like the style, but I feel like most shops like this cater too exclusively to the indie rock concert poster thing. I’d like to see more sites like Blanka Supersize with the modernist, purist design stuff going on.
Big Ant International created these posters for the Global Coalition for Peace. The series has garnered significant recognition of late, including a Silver Pencil at the One Show Awards, and nominations for both the D&AD and CLIO Awards 2009. The posters are wrapped around street poles and achieve that ever so illusive “aha” moment when viewed in this circular manner.
I would imagine a poster series depicting soldiers essentially pointing guns at themselves is bound to be met with some controversy, but it seems clear to me that the “target” of the campaign is the US foreign policy and not the soldiers themselves. The metaphor is clear. Hopefully as the work competes for further acclaim, opinions about the message won’t get in the way of recognizing the work as a successful piece of graphic design. The series is a great example of a simple and brilliant concept executed very effectively.
A couple pieces from the wonderful Astrid Stavro. The top image was the poster for Maria Canals International Piano Competition in 2007, and the bottom is from the Forum Laus Europe in 2006. I’ve seen some of her other work circulating on the blogs recently, but I prefer these older posters for their refined typography.
I also enjoyed this quote they have up on their website: “Small design companies produce good work, large ones produce shit work.” (Jonathan Barnbrook). Not sure if I agree completely (because I just don’t know, not because I have evidence to the contrary), but the work coming out of Astrid’s studio certainly validates the claim.
