Alphonse Mucha

I generally like clean, contemporary graphics, but I make an exception for certain Art Nouveau works. Even though many of these items are highly decorated, two aspects of the style appeal to my tastes: often the biomorphic shapes and lines are asymmetric, and when the decoration is integrated into the whole, it's not longer superficial but becomes an element of the overall form and design.

Alphonse Mucha exemplifies these characteristics.

Posted by Jonathan

Audio-inspired Visuals

Posters have been a chosen medium to promote concerts for a long time. I love walking the halls at the Fillmore - an old music venue in San Francisco - and seeing the posters that promoted The Grateful Dead or Jimi Hendrix.

I went to the Experience Music Project in Seattle several years ago, and they had this excellent exhibit on music posters.


You can pinpoint the artist by their poster style, even if they design for multiple bands. I think this is a good thing and a bad thing. In trying to find this exhibit, I also came across this other exhibit that features letterpress posters. I like how the letterpress posters give the concert that retro and classy look.



Posted by Sara.

Retro Fonts

(Lennart Wolfert)



I love retro and out-there fonts (like Bauhaus, Broadway, Harlow...), the crazier the better. These fonts are probably some graphic designers worst nightmare. They obviously are not the most functional or versatile fonts out there but they can transform work into something that simple Arial or Times New Roman just can't bring to the table.

This is a cool index of font websites from How Design. My favorites out of the bunch are Font Bros. and Font Diner. I highly recommend checking out some of these - lots of cool stuff to explore. Typography is such a powerful tool in graphic design. It can definitely make or break your work.

An article from Smashing Magazine has great typographic posters to browse through. It really shows how far you can push typography.

Posted by Whitney.

Cool Theater Posters

My son majored in Musical Theater at a little college in Franklin, MA, near Boston. Somehow, a company named Red Dog Designs created the posters for the College's theater productions. Here are two examples:

The poster for A Midsummer Night's Dream requires a little explanation. Cleverly, the motif for the production was a 1970's disco club with Oberon--King of the Fairies--patterned after David Bowie, and Titania--Queen of the Fairies-- modeled after Stevie Nicks. I think that the poster does a better job creating interest in attendance than any verbal explanation could.

Anything Goes is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter in 1934. The action takes place on an ocean liner bound to London from New York City.

I admire the way the designer captured the Art Deco style of the era with a shape so abstract that objectively it doesn't look anything like a ship, yet is unmistakable. I'm not sure if you can see the visual texture added to the image, but it's a little bit like stucco.

Posted by Jonathan

I really liked the imagery of this poster. I think it makes a very bold statement. Inspirational for our upcoming poster design.

posted by Scott.

Welcome to Fall 2009 - Graphic Design 1.

Hello.

More info at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Sam

Posted by Neal.

Aesthetic Apparatus

Here are a couple of posters from Aesthetic Apparatus (http://www.aestheticapparatus.com), they have a lot of interesting work on their site incorporating band names with found images.
- Kirstin