STEP 100 Design Annual 2004
NOON: 504 Hours: STEP 100 Award
How are you feeling today—exactly? Cinthia Wen, creative director at Noon, tackled this question scientifically in 504 Hours, a poster she donated to an AIGA benefit auction of works on the theme “Within Four Walls”. “For me, it was about the effect of city living,” says Wen. “Since I like documenting and psychology, I documented my mood for 21 days by the hour, and then I color-coded them and created the poster out of it.
“Each horizontal bar is a day,” Wen continues. “Blue is when I’m calm—asleep, mainly. Black is when I’m not so happy. An3hen there’s agitation. There’s a legend to the left, so you can chart how I did. I also had little symbols: days where I had a revelation, days where I drank too much.” Wen made notes hourly on a scratchpad; the visualization of those notes came later.
“How would one make tangible of the things that one can’t visualize—time, mood, space?” Wen asks. “Because you live life every day, you can’t visualize your time. When you look at this, it feels like it’s all about color—just color stripes. But when you look at it from afar, there’s a certain pulse to it.”
—Jude Stewart for STEP Inside Design, March/April 2004
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F2DESIGN: BOZART: STEP 100 Award
In a dusty Texan street, telephone poles wrapped in this image could really unnerve you. Maybe ET finally has landed. Designer Dirk Fowler explains: “This particular band, it’s an instrumental duo called Bozart. My goal with the image is to create something that, on a telephone pole lining the street, would stand out from xeroxed flyers. My stuff’s all letterpress, hand-inked. Pretty primitive. I started with two figures, representing the two band members, and found by overlapping them they created a third, mysterious, alien image there in the middle. They’re instrumental, so you could say that the third image, with no mouth—it’s just a haunting image.”
Fowler uses a 1920s Vandercook #1 proof press and runs each poster laboriously by hand. “I use a combination of hand-carved images—in this case, wood and lead-type and a linoleum image. And each color, each pass, has to be hand brayered,” says Fowler. “Most of the music I’m doing posters for, they’re not bands that are signed with record labels. So it’s really music for the people--people who enjoy music. It’s not about the bar, or the setting. Well, my design is a little like that. It’s very handmade, not mass-produced.”
—Jude Stewart for STEP Inside Design, March/April 2004
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F2DESIGN: JUCIFER: STEP 100 Award
For Dirk Fowler, designing gig posters is an imaginative grab-bag: he digs into his head and dredges up wonders. “I do all kinds of design,” he says. “But with these pieces, I get so much freedom. Sometimes it boils down to, I get this image in my mind and I’m allowed to make it.
“I was thinking about the cliché of something being cutting edge. I came up with this image of this razor. The big silver thing is a razor-blade.” He chuckles. “A lot of younger people don’t even recognize that sort of razor.”
Like most of Fowler’s posters, he makes them individually with a 1920s Vandercook #1 proof press and his collection of antique wood and lead types—plenty of work for an image that’s stapled to telephone poles and stolen within a few days.
What about the name, Jucifer? Is this an evil band? He laughs again. “Yeah, it is kind of evil. Of course, Lucifer and juice—those things together. But I tried to contrast something kind of evil that’s happening with a childlike, innocent, sweet image. And there’s a little bit of that quality to the music. Not commercial, kind of innocent in a way.”
F2DESIGN: LUCERO: STEP 100 Award
In his spare time, designer Dirk Fowler does gig posters—seriously. He hand-brayers each poster on a 1920s Vandercook #1 proof press in tiny runs—usually less than 100—and they’re all stolen or discarded within a few days. “Lucero is a little more traditional letterpress in its look, than my usual stuff,” he notes. “It’s all done with wood type, and then the boy scouts image—that’s an old photo engraving. That particular woodblock is probably sixty years old, at least.
“The tall, skinny format lends itself to the telephone pole shape. The thing about my posters—they always go out on the street,” Fowler continues. “It’s on real heavy chipboard, so it’s kind of cheap, temporary paper. The press embosses the type into it, so texture is part of my design.”
Does the fact that his posters are temporary ever bother him? Not a bit. “I have students who swipe one of everything that I design,” Fowler notes matter-of-factly. “I had one student who told me he’d taken four copies of one of 'em. I told him I wasn’t staying up all night ... printing just for him. That’s kind of the cool thing—I have no control over what happens to them.”
—Jude Stewart for STEP Inside Design, March/April 2004
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More STEP 100 Design Annual Articles
53: NOON: Lunch at Noon Announcement
62: NOON: Lunch at Noon website
66: EYEBALL NYC
73: ARCHRIVAL: GOTUSED.COM
76: ARKZIN, MIRKO ILIC CORP.
98: MIRKO ILIC CORP.
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