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Explodes in the Brain

So, one of my uh influences as a designer is a uh a poster designer from the 19 hundreds, early 19 hundreds called uh his name is uh am Cassandra. Cassandra made these beautiful, beautiful advertising posters. And he was also a quotable motherfucker, right? And one thing that he, he said has stuck with me over the years and he basically says, um he's trying to, he's trying to qualify what a good image is, what a good poster is. And he says a good poster enters through the eye and explodes in the brain, meaning we first have to see it. We first have to make something that, that, that catches our attention that says, hey, look at me, hey, look at me. And then when they put all the pieces together, when they put all the pieces together, the logo plus the image plus of this, it makes this huge idea and you just go, you look at it and then you go f That's awesome. So I wanted to take you through some of these pieces here. Um And these are pieces from uh my collection, I used to have a massi...

ve collection of posters and I realized they sat in drawers and tubes and, um, and were rotting. So I, you know, kind of gotten rid of a lot of stuff, but I kept all of my favorites and it's, most of these are from, uh kind of where I come from professionally, like in heavy influences. Um, um, let me, let me, let me take you through, through this little show. So, um, the first chunk here is uh about basically about May 1968 in May 1968 around the world, the world was on fire. It was the Vietnam War. It, um, um, it was, um, peace love, it was Woodstock. It was, you know, the, the, the, the contrast, socially and politically in the world was really huge. And in Paris May this was the student and cultural, uh, student and worker revolt, right? So the students barricaded the schools and locked themselves inside and didn't let the, uh, the authorities in. They would go out at night and put post, you know, they, they would, they would and I know the guys who were in school there too, they became friends of mine. They're like my peers and my mentors, but they barricaded them as a schools themselves in school and they had these deep political conversations and they made a bunch of posters and at night they'd open the doors and they'd all go out and they post like rats, post these posters all over the streets, you know, about like about equality and about business and about how the world is supposed to be. And about, right. And um, um then the day would come out and all the cops would come and take all the posters down. Um, and they gave, they go back into the school and lock the doors and they'd start, it would just go again and again and again and again like this. Um um So the posters like this would come up with just basically says no to big business, right? Just the, this, this factory, this is what the, you know, the cliche of a factory with those louvered ceilings and turning into a, you know, like a fat guy cigar, right? Uh There's a second one on the back of this and these were actually on the wall. That's why they have this, this Pentimento to them because the guy I bought them from was in Paris at the time and he was a poster nut at the time and he went and took these off the wall. Um And he said he got beat up more than once for doing it. Um So this, this one you can see it kind of has the, the, the the the wheat paste kind of color to it. But this is um um an image of Charles de Gaulle who is uh the, the well is close to a, like a fascist in the French that you know that you can get. Um And here he is, it says uh uh la, la, la che Elysee Encore Louis means uh it's, you know, it's, it's him and his bullshit, his dog shit is actually the, you know, Shen Le is dog shit. So um um yeah, I mean, he's got these like wings, these poopy wings just like early political satire. And again, here's the uh here's, here's, here's the flag, the literally the flag that they flew was this May 1968 the factories with this um uh this Marxist flag, the the the beginning of a the beginning of a long struggle is what this says. Debut Du Lute pro L is struggle. And every time I touch these posters, they die a little bit more and this is calling out the the cops as vermin fascist, fascist rats and calling for civic civic action. But um I love this one particularly I love because I love all the imperfection in it is like these were literally, this is literally the paper that was used to roll out on the lunch tables, right? And they'd bring them into the, into the art class and they use the the silk screen, right? You know what, why they're just like one color, get it done like they'd make, they'd make, you know, a couple of 100 of these and they would all be different and all be imperfect and then they would get them out in the street the next day and then you get graphic designers start coming in like Tommy Ungerer and this is about the uh the Vietnam war about going to going over to Vietnam and forcing freedom on these people like you eat and doing it. He, and he was very funny because he's doing it in the form of an advertising poster, right? Using this word, this word eat like it should be Cheerios or something, you know, I mean, if you don't see my work in that, you know, and here there's two, here I wanna show at the same time, one by a commercial designer. Uh and this is a poster by Seymour Quast who again at the same time, uh sixties, late sixties doing in the form of a commercial poster um making a poster of Uncle Sam with uh some the bombing of Hanoi in his mouth and it says in bad breath like a like a toothpaste ad, right? So that's one way of doing it like being a designer. This is like this is why like during um after 911, I kind of got vocal about people about graphic designers putting making statements because I said stop making statements because you're doing it because you have Quark, you're not doing it because you have feeling that you feel lost or that you've lost a child or that it's, you're, it's not authentic. You're like showing pictures of like peace signs with the fingers are cut off and all these cute cliches but, but there's no meaning to it and that's what this is. It's like I'm doing it because yes, I wanna make a statement about the war, but do you really wanna stop it? Do you really wanna make change? Do you really wanna affect people? This is cute and collectible. Um But at the same time, um the Me Lai massacre had just happened. The Me Lai massacre was some soldiers went into this village and is the classic. They use their Zippo lighters and set the bill, set all the huts on fire and gather everybody up and just shot them all down, just American soldiers and just shot them all down. Like I don't know who, I don't know if there's Viet Cong here or not. Well, let's just take them all and they shot them all down and they left him in a ditch, Mike Wallace who as you know, from, you know, maybe uh uh old uh 60 minutes, right? He uh he was a young reporter and he went there and he interviewed some of the soldiers, one of whose name is Paul Medow. And he interviewed Paul Medow and the question was and babies and the answer was and, and babies. So that piece of information came to Stateside and there was a coalition of designers in San Francisco that wanted to stop the war and they created this poster and they printed tens of thousands of these and distributed them as wide as they could on crappy paper with just the photograph from May Live and the question and babies and the answer and babies and this level of photojournalism. This poster was um seminal in really getting Americans at home against the war, right? Because this really brought it home. This kind of shit, doesn't this is cute and clever, right? This is truth. I'm not saying you have to make it that visceral or that ugly. But if you want change, right? Um The same thing with um the same problem, the same dichotomy with uh A I DS posters. They were all cute, they were all pretty, they were all like beautiful couples, you know, holding each other and it says na I DS that doesn't stop shit that sells socks, right? That doesn't say listen people we're fucking dying. But the companies who were distributing those A I DS posters like Amnesty International or um or whomever um those companies, the way they make money is teachers and old ladies send them checks and the first way to turn off teachers and old ladies is to tell the truth like this, right? So again, commercially, we have to know who we work for. These are gonna be in the way. So one of the guys from the May 68 group, his name is Pierre Bernard. He later became a friend of mine. Um uh he and the other pals of his who um um who uh from school at the time, formed a design studio called Graus um which is Grap us. And the way they got the, that name Graus, the way they developed that name was they, as the students in the press were referred to as crap. Stalin Yes, which was meant which meant um Stalin Stalinist crap is what they refer to as the students. So this the graph who said, oh OK, we're gonna call ourselves, we're gonna take the graphic G and call ourselves graus. So it's still, we're still crap. But now we're designers. Um And this was a poster he did later on um for the rights of man. It was a uh a worldwide exhibition a number of years ago um um about a document called The Rights of Man that was published. And, and for them, they didn't really believe in the document. They didn't believe that it was working. So they basically made this poster that said um rich and poor and the idea is that the rich are sitting in the hand of the poor. Excuse me. Now, the funny thing is um I, when I met him and just after this was, this was published and he, he, he gave, he actually gave me one, he visited the States and um I went and saw him, he was in Rhode Island. I went and visited him and I knew about the poster and I said, why is it in gold? Why gold? And he said, he says at graus, we like to deal with the truth. And he said so we generally a lot of our stuff is in black and white because that's what we call of. You know, again, those, those cliches, those vehicles that we use. Those details, the little tracks in the snow that we use in black and white. He says in black and white is truth. It's not true that the rich shit in the hands of the poor. So what, what's the wrongest color we could use would be gold. And it's funny because it says on the side uh when he gave it to me, I took it home and I unrolled it and it says to James Victoria who doesn't trust in gold. So here's a funny thing. This is uh my pal Stefan Stefan Sagmeister. This is a poster he did for a uh a IG a conference a couple of years ago in New Orleans. And to him, conferences were um you know, again, he, it it's like a round peg, square hole, square peg, round hole, whatever to him. He just, he said, conferences, conferences to me is everybody like running around like a chicken with their head cut off. So he glommed onto that. The chicken with the head cut off. That's fine. It's not interesting on its own, but it becomes interesting when you design the fuck out of it. Like do a really, really good job. And what he did was a really good job of creating a chicken with its head cut off. Right. What were the people at the A IG, I aware that they were being made fun of, or they, like, we were leaning into it because I'm going to a IG A now. But it got done. Well. He's done other images for a IJ A that people hated. So, so he's, isn't he part of them then? He's part of the organization? So he is the machine itself a big um Yeah, you can, you can, you can, you can look at it a number of different ways, you know, but he's here, he's uh here, he's making fun of conferences in general. Um um And again, his whole thing and the reason I have it is because I'm kind of like, I want simplicity. I wanna hatch it away. Like, and he's like, Glom and I was like, OK, if you're gonna do Glom just do it really well. I mean, like even like the typography made out of chicken legs, it's hilarious. Where's the map on the back of that poster? Oh, on the back is um is a lot, there's a lot on the back. Oh Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's like, it's like um all the things that are gonna happen, there's the thing, there's the, the, the uh where you fill out. Um This is the, the names of all the people who are gonna be there. Yeah. It's a lot. It's like, it's manic. Yeah, it's Maxim Miller. Yeah. And I have a couple of posters from a pal of mine, a Russian designer who uh who I love. His name is uh um uh Banko. This one is, is Macbeth. And what I love about him is like his complete freedom, right? Um Like just this painterly and just, just almost random typography. But if you look at both of these posters, I'm gonna show you if you look typographically at the grid, if you wanna get nudnik about it, if you look at the grid, it's genius. Like where, where, where, where the, when he uses real type, you know, the Helvetica stuff or logos, it's really genius where I mean, where it's laid out where he takes, he takes a grid and almost turns it into chaos. You know, if you look at like this, all this typography on the side and the pink and the black and where it sits, it's really smart. Um And this was for his uh um yeah, this Peter Bankoff Pather um for when his book came out, he came to the States and his book was called I make posters every day and he literally does, he literally does make a poster every day. Um And what happens when you do that is what, when you practice every day, what happens, you get really fucking good. And here it's interesting. I, it doesn't show up in these two posters, but I've got a AAA good chunk of his posters and see this, this stuff in pink that, that like scribble that shows up in a lot of his work. So basically he's made a bunch of marks, paint, paint splatters and scribbles and different things and he has an entire library of them. Hi, Rez. And you can just call them up, you know, whenever he want and use them again and again and again and sometimes they look like, oh, I've seen it before and sometimes it's just, like, completely shocking. It's just his own vocabulary that he's created a library of his own images. It's so good. I mean, I'm sure he has got his library of his own typography too. I like that. He's allowed to use the same motif, like over and over and over because, like, when I was in school I have a couple of projects where I have just like, kind of scribbles like that. And it was like, not allowed. You can have only one project with that. That's it. You know, he's like, he lives off of it. Well, they were telling you not to have a style, which is crazy. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. He lives off of it. Yeah. Oh, do, do so. So, you know, one conversation that, you know, Shannon and I have had and we, I've had with groups and it's a really smart teaching point is, didn't you know that you can make a living doing fucking anything, anything in the, in the 2022 Guinness Book of World Records. There's a guy who travels around the world because he's the world's loudest farter. Wow. Right. So he's probably figured he's probably got T shirts and stuff to buy and. Right. And maybe he doesn't have a lot of friends though. Oh, he dates models. He only dates models. Um Did you do so? So on the point of you can make a living doing pretty much anything if you guys know. Um and I I hate to use his name Mr Doodle. OK. This guy is just little black and white doodles. He's the fifth highest paid artist alive and that's all he does. So don't tell me you can't have a style. He just gets paid to do that one. Don't ask me what that one thing is because I have a pretty strong opinion about what they think is. So, um so we're gonna go backwards in time a little bit and this is the um fifties and uh sixties um Eastern European, a couple of a couple of the, the fathers of the modern poster. Um One particular is, is my uh mentor is um um um Henrik Tomaszewski, which is the the love poster back here is, is Henri, which is where our assignment came from, right? And in that one you can see in the in the typography of love. Um Before him was Robert Indiana who did the, the love, the love painting, which was L and the O was at an angle. Love. Right. Right. So he just did another play on it because nothing is original. We, we, we build on each other, we stand on the shoulders of giants as it's called. And here he's got the L has this kind of penis shape and the o has this open mouth and the v has this kind of vagina and the e has got that extra thing on it. Like, I don't know why there's another cross bar, but he's just kind of making loose references to, to love and, and sex, very body, very robust guy. Um And this is 1970. This is a, an exhibition about Polish posters. Um um Polish surrealist posters because basically in the, in the, in the sixties and seventies, most Polish posters were sore. Um So this is uh Jan Leni. Jan Leni and it's uh the bowler hat with the brain in it. Kind of a lovely, lovely piece not gonna talk about this, but it's OK. Uh This is Henri um for a Marionette Theater. So this was about a Marinette theater. And um in New York, there were two big festivals, Marionette festivals that would come through every year. And I would see the posters for, I never went because it never looked interesting to me, but I would see the posters and they were usually photographs of puppets on strings, right? That's what we usually get. We get, we usually like the, you know, we get, we get the cliche. We get a photograph of the, it's like an auto show, right? You get photos of cars, a flower show, you get photos of flowers. It, it's just like it's not even doing the cliche. It's just wallowing in it, right? Flowers get it. Na na. But here now Henri has that same opportunity to do something about the marionettes about puppetry and look what he does. So basically he has the legs of a a ventriloquist dummy, right? You have it in you, you know, you talk and he's not showing that bit. He's not showing that relationship. He's almost showing the relationship under the table. He's almost showing the intimacy between the puppet and the, and the um ventriloquist and it has this warm purple leg that's wrapped around the leg of the chair, right? And then these two white legs and they're like they have, they have, they have uh pivots, they're articulated, right? So there's a, there's an intimacy thing here which is very weird and the, and the, and the, the, the, the, the very, very um rudimentary way that the chair is made. I love this piece. OK. So I have two copies of this. I have one that's framed uh in the studio at home. It just sits in a pile with a bunch of others. Um And then I have and I have this one that's getting beat up. Uh This is Edward the second which is a Christopher Marlowe play um a compatriot of Shakespeare. And um I used to have this um at the end of a big huge black, I had a design table about this big, but it was, it was like bar height and it was glass black and at the end was a white wall and this poster sat at the end of the white wall. And I used to sit by myself and I'd sit in this in a, in a, in a high stool with my feet up on my desk and a and a um a magazine. I just go and get fashion magazines because they were big at the time and I could just uh and a sharpie and I would just go page by page and just draw something on every page. It was just my practice like, you know, um but I would either and then I, and I would drink a big huge bottle of wine and I'd stare at this poster and I would try to figure out what he was thinking, not the image but all the typography and where it sits. If you look, there's unlike Peter Bekoff, there's like zero grid, nothing sitss where it's supposed to, nothing is centered, nothing is off center. The image itself isn't centered, right? So, so, so design wise, this is kind of like, that's what people all over the place. And then image wise, what is that image of a hand? What kind of hand? Yeah. Almost like boy scouts are almost like this, right? So, does anybody know that Edward? The second play? Ok, Edward is King Edward is king, but Edward is gay and the queen knows it and the queen hates that idea. So she has him, um, banished, she has the king banished. The king's lover finds out and goes and finds him and brings him back into the castle and hide him. And the queen finds out and she brings her guards to her and she says, take him and they, she, and they say, what should we do with him? And she says, I don't care and what they do to him, oh, by the way, he's a good king. Like he's very just and he's very, he's a good person. But what they do to him is they kill him and the way they kill him is they is they bugger him with red hot pokers, right? Because he's gay. So this finger has kind of like the Jesus finger, but it kind of has this kind of power to it as well and notice it's not red, it's not angry, it's not, it just is and it's in black and white, which is interesting. It is a cat. This is a cat and actually in my school of visual arts class. I had an assignment called cat. And the idea was to like, I know what cats look like. I can draw cats, show me a cat. Like I've never seen it before. Ok. So here there's just, there's just things about this cat that are like, oh, hopefully, hopefully the idea is to like, find the cat. Cat is a cliche, find a new way to present it. I saw this poster in a book years ago and it changed my work completely. I, I work in silhouettes. I work with, you know, lousy childish typography and everything. It's all in here. I've never read this play. It's called The Police. I don't know what that play is. Here's another, another Tomaszewski um called a Tale of IOS. And I've never found this. So I don't know what it is, but it has this kind of Cinderella thing to it, right? Just this, this shoe by itself. Um And the last thing I wanna talk about is this piece here, which I love this. This is um what it says on the poster is the, that's the name of the theater is, it's the, it's the studio theater, uh um Tetro studio and then the name on the ironing board because it's an iron and an ironing board. The name on it is Vats and this is after the Second World War. And um it's well after it's 72 but um something had been set up in in eastern Europe away when it was, when it was, when it was demolished after the Second World War. Um and there weren't a lot of theaters and this was um after the Second World War, Poland uh basically became Russian. And the um um the Communists at the time said, um social realism is gonna be the way now. This is the art form that everything has to follow through social realism means it has to look like what it looks like. The Polish artists were winning a lot of awards internationally and this won them a little bit of freedom. So every, every, every, every year they got a, a little bit more free Tomaszewski almost got in trouble once because his name was bigger than the authors names on some of the, some of the pieces that he was designing, right? Um But what happened is since there were very few theaters left standing. Um and they wouldn't let a lot of Western artists let a lot Western authors in, but they wanted to offer theater and movies to their people to look like they were doing a good job. So the Polish community, the poles understood, they knew all the playwrights and they knew all the plays because you basically get the same few plays to come through every year, right? So um the the theaters also got good budgets to hire posters to do a good job because it was just distraction for, for the polls don't pay attention to what we communists are doing. Just go watch your theater. Look, look what we're doing for you. So they knew the au, they knew the poets, they knew the authors and the, the theaters got money to put posters up year round. And if they didn't use the budget, like any, like when you get budget budget from any, um, any, uh, client or, or, or, or, um, especially if you work in govern government. I worked in for the city of New York. And if you don't use the budget, you don't get as much next year. So they use the budget and they would print posters year round even though they didn't have plays. So this poster was like that this poster was for the studio theater and it says Vasi who's one of the playwrights and what this poster is saying is, hey, stick around. We're cleaning up our vic coi for next year, right? We're busy here getting ready for next year, next season. And the, and, and the funny thing is the the audience understood it because you have an educated audience. If they're educated, it's an educated audience because of, of, of lack, they're an educated audience because of a certain level of poverty, but they know their culture, which is hilarious. So it's like, yeah, we're taking Vasi is gonna look really great this year. I love this piece and that's uh Henri from 1972 po a while ago. Um Awesome. You guys have any questions about this? I show these pieces because of like the, the, the various techniques, the um I showed them to, to, to free you guys, you know, um I show you because um uh to, to widen your, your, your vocabulary as to what's available and what you can do, you can make a living off of scribbles. Um A little bit of history of what people have done before. Things that are good and things that are bad. I think this is the ugliest fucking bo box of typography I've ever seen in my entire life seriously. But I love Hendrick, but he had a reason for that. I'm sure, you know, and here's an example of, you know, if you would turn the table sideways, horizontal, you could fit the whole ironing board.