Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated this thing, and I promised myself when I started this blog that I wouldn’t forget about it. So here’s to more regular posting. I figured a good topic to yap about for a few lines would be Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival, which I just attended over Labor Day weekend. Two highlights of the fest (apart from the roll call of awesome bands) were Flatstock 18, a great poster show chock-full of music posters, many of them screen printed and completely fantastic; and the Seattle-Tehran Poster Show, a smaller but no less magnificent collection of posters done by—you guessed it—designers in both Seattle and Tehran. After going to school at Colorado State University and taking the CIIPE for granted, it was nice to get my poster fix. The CIIPE (Colorado International Invitational Poster Exhibition), incidentally, is largely responsible for my passion for poster design, and a tiny bit responsible for why I moved to Seattle. So way to go, CSU.
T-Shirt printed by The New Year.
Poster printed by Valhalla Studios.
Poster printed by Furturtle Show Prints.
Anyhow, I thought I’d put up crappy digital pictures of the posters and t-shirt I got at Flatstock, because this wouldn’t be a real blog without crappy digital pictures. The shirt came from a designer named Sasha Barr and his outfit The New Year. I dig his illustration style, and couldn’t resist getting the tee even though green’s not exactly my color. The “My Morning Jacket” poster is from Valhalla Studios in Kansas, making them one of the only few cool things (that I am aware of, anyway) going on in Kansas right now. This poster is amazing because it features a gigantic owl, staring at you with as much wisdom as a gigantic owl of his disposition can possibly muster. The second poster hails from Furturtle Show Prints, a print shop based in Utah, where dirt comes from. I have to admit, I had previously browsed the posters on Furturtle’s site a few months ago, and didn’t come away feeling too impressed. Seeing them in person is a different story. They were one of the few shops to really take advantage of different colors of paper stock, and they took care to work that into their designs. Nice work, fellas.
These were just two of the dozens of poster artists present at the show. The work ranged from crazy death metal posters with skeletons and guns to simple shoegazer rock posters with feathers and clipper ships. My fiancè and I cruised through the show several times over the course of the weekend, and it always felt like you were seeing something new.
The Seattle-Tehran show was definitely smaller in scale than Flatstock, but that’s because it was more of a formal art exhibition, as opposed to a crazy music-inspired rocket-fueled poster flea market. What I found most interesting about the work in this little presentation was the Arabic typography in the Iranian posters—the text was rendered in such interesting ways that sometimes it was impossible (for an English-only speaker like myself, anyway) to determine what was text and what was illustration. What I found myself appreciating more than the traditional calligraphic Arabic, however, were the Arabic typefaces. There were a couple posters featuring very geometric Arabic lettering that I thought were pretty interesting, as they challenged the traditional flow and flourish of Arabic calligraphy. Overall great work, though, and the photo slideshow they had running the whole time reminded us sheltered Americans that artists and designers do exist in Iran, and not only that, they look a whole lot like the artists and designers that exist in the U.S. It’s not all terrorists and deserts, as I feel like we’re sometimes led to believe. But that’s another post for another time.
In closing, I’d like to leave you with a poster I designed a few days ago, based on a ridiculous stock photo. I thought it resembled the health and wellness posters that dotted nurses offices and school gyms in the 80s and 90s. Enjoy, and until next time, don’t forget to stock up on your smencils.
Mullets Hurt poster ©Ryan Polich 2008
