My friends at Target Margin Theater in NYC asked me to create an image for their recent production of the classic Chekhov play Uncle Vanya.
Since Target Margin is all about taking classic plays and putting an unusual spin on them, often deconstructing and transforming them in surprising ways we try to make sure all of their marketing materials do something similar.
In this case we honed in on a map that is a central element to the production and used it as a way to diagram the central character, in this case played by Greig Sargeant, whose face is visible within the illustration. The text on the map, provided by director David Herskovits, gives glimpses into the central themes of the show.
For the past several years I have designed the brochure for Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks series of plays in NYC. Each year I create a set of illustrations that tie the diverse shows together.
This year paper and color were strong themes throughout the shows so we decided to go with hand-cut paper illustrations for each one, using unexpected combinations of items to hint at the stories they tell.
More details about the productions, which begin this week, can be found HERE.
Some of the previous Summerworks brochures I've designed & illustrated can be found HERE and HERE.
We went with metallic silver ink on a white matte coated post-consumer
waste recycled stock and used embossing and an unusual angled die-cut on
both the invitation and reply card to let people know that this would
be a funky, high end event.
I recently designed this one-of-a-kind packaging for Apollo, the new release from the alternative music group Icebreaker and pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole, from Cantaloupe Music.
This album is a new version of the classic minimalist compositions by Brian Eno, Roger Eno & Daniel Lanois which they wrote for a documentary about the Apollo space missions.
The goal with the package was to create something that reflected the minimalism of the music and the austere beauty of its subject matter without being entirely literal.
A die-cut semicircle on the cover allows the metallic silver booklet within to be revealed in the shape of a half moon. The rest of the package plays off the idea of an invisible new moon which is only revealed by the text flowing around it.
More information about this release can be found HERE.
I recently had the privilege of being invited to speak and participate in the 2012 Design Ethos Conference/Do-ference at Savannah College of Art and Design.
The creator of the conference, Scott Boylston, is a longtime friend in the relatively small socially conscious design community and I was delighted that he chose to be included in a roster of many other like-minded folks I had know for ages, but most of which I never met in person.
Even more exciting was that for this second ever Design Ethos Conference Scott was initiating a new element: the Do-ference. OK it’s a silly name, but it got the point across: rather than just the typical days of keynote speakers and panels with a lot of schmoozing and backslapping Scott had the crazy idea to actually do something with the talent he was amassing.
The visiting designers, myself included, would not only give talks to the attendees of the conference, but be broken into six groups to work with local students and community members on real projects over the course of the 3 days we were there.
Scott had previously been working with his students and members of the Waters Avenue district on how to both improve the neighborhood and SCAD’s relationship to it. This working class area had seen better days, but was trying to move beyond its image as being dangerous and rundown, without sacrificing its unique culture.
On our first day in Savannah all of the Do-ference participants were introduced to a range of community members who gave us an overview of the situation and the very real concerns of the neighborhood that they not be mistreated by the school or let down as they have been in the past.
We were then brought to the Waters Avenue area and broken into our respective groups to get tours related to the topics we would be tackling: Community, Business, Youth, Culture, and Renewal.
My group (which included my friend Mark Randall of Worldstudio and The New School's chair of design thinking & sustainability Cameron Tonkinwise, along with a gaggle of enthusiastic undergrad design students* from a variety of programs and graduate student Tiffany Lindborn who would stay focused on the project after the conference was over) was assigned Youth, and more specifically Harambee House’s community garden at the former Saint Pius X church.
Behind the boarded up church building (which we were told was filled with so much lead paint and asbestos that it would cost as much to replace as repair and was in limbo at the moment) was an unmarked plot of land that currently had rows of cabbage growing in it.
Our tour guides were Dr. Mildred McClain the director of Harambee House and Gator Rivers, a former Harlem Globetrotter who had returned to his hometown and was now using his skills to introduce young people to the farming and specifically to work on the garden and spread the message of health and nutrition.
After a wonderful walking tour of the neighborhood, which featured an impromptu visit to the living room of local celebrity & Gullah chef Sallie Robinson, we sat down with our guides to get a thorough understanding of the issues that the garden was facing and how a group of designers & students could really help in the two days we had left.
What became immediately clear was that there was a great deal of passion and knowledge, but the organizations goals were diverse and along with a definite need for funding there was also just a basic need to get people in the wider community to even know of the garden’s existence.
Day two of the conference was spent working with our community members to diagram the situation and help them organize their needs into some practical plans so that we could most effectively use our remaining time to develop some functional tools.
It was decided that we should break the issues (and the group) into three areas of focus: Funding, Communications, and Systems. Each group then subdivided their areas into a list of practical ideas and suggestions from which we would choose the most practical to actually make happen on our final day.
Day three was spent creating a document that could be handed over to the Harambee House staff to implement as they saw fit. This document, gathered into a set of three-ring binders, contained printouts of all of our work along with a disc of all of our digital resources. It included diagrams for the functioning of the organization; along with several pages of practical suggestions for funding sources; a long list of potential design elements that would help them achieve their communications goals (with the help of several hours of pro-bono design being offered by two firms to all of the organizations being supported by the Do-ference); and a guide for practical problem solving using a innovative storyboard methodology.
Since it felt wrong to provide only theoretical tools we decided to give them a few practical tools as well. The students created a design for a welcome sign for the garden officially branding it “Harambee Farms at Saint Pius X” labeling it “Home of the Harambee Globecroppers,” a name that was finalized by Gator for his student basketball players in the midst of our discussions.
The students also created a sample yard sign so that people in the neighborhood could show their allegiance to the farm with the clever “I Dig Harambee Farms” slogan on it, referencing the admonition “Dig In” that they had put on the welcome sign.
Both signs were then quickly manufactured by the students on a sign printer at the school, while they were digitally inserted into pictures of the farm and neighborhood to show the impact it would make.
And since the students were on a roll they decided to also make: a set of laser cut paint stencils to allow the Harambee Farms logo to be instantly put anywhere and everywhere that was needed; and a set of stickers to allow for simple branding for packaging of Harambee Farms produce.
Since the culmination of the Do-ference required that we finish with a 15 minute presentation by each of the groups, the last hour of our 3 days was spent preparing a slide deck. In addition a vegetable crate was quickly procured from a local farmer’s market and decorated with the brand new stencil to show it in use and give a container to the three ring binders and other materials that were created, which we planned to hand over to the Harambee House staff when we finished our presentation.
With minutes to spare everything was completed and we rushed to the SCAD theater where the students in the group took the lead and presented the process and our results ending with an quick performance of some truly impressive ball handling skills by the Gator Rivers himself.
It was an exhausting, amazing, empowering, overwhelming, moving experience that had all of the participants cheering for each other, as we discovered what our fellow Do-ers had been up to for the last few days.
And happily with Scott’s direction and a group of highly dedicated grad students, who are truly committed to the community, the work that was produced as part of the conference will not just dissipate now that the visiting designers have gone home and the students have returned to their regular classes.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this project continues and hope to get back to Savannah to spend more time with my new friends down there again before too long, perhaps even at next year’s Do-ference.
Find out more about more about the post-conference progress on the Design Ethos blog.
Also be sure and read Mark Randall's post about the event HERE.
*The wonderful undergrads: Marco Amaya, Rebeca de la Torre, Annie Masincupp, Carla Paola Torres, Michael Kress, Danielle Raynal, Medini Cardenas, Carlos Estrada, Jill Graves
For the upcoming gig of my band League of Space Pirates I created these companion posters...
The first is an advertisement for Übercorp, the largest corporate entity in the universe (and League of Space Pirates sworn enemy), and it features their tagline "We Make It. You Buy It." silkscreened in silver and black-light reactive yellow-green on black acid-free paper...
The second is the actual poster for the upcoming event at Gallery 5 here in Richmond, VA. It features a spray-paint stencil of the gig details overprinted in black-light reactive red...
Both posters were printed by my friends at Team Eight and the stencil I used to create the art on the gig poster was custom laser cut by my friend Jason at BIG SECRET.
You can buy both posters in the League of Space Pirates store HERE.
And of course, if you're in the area I hope you'll come check out the show!
Next month, the first annual Brooklyn Zine Fest brings together 60+ writers, illustrators, photographers, and publishers proving that the DIY, small scale publishing culture is alive and thriving.
And the event’s organizers are determined to make sure there's a place for it in NYC. “The last major zine fest in New York City was several years ago. At this juncture in DIY culture, it’s critical to bring zines into the public eye as a medium that’s been thriving for decades and continues to do so in the digital age,” said Eric Nelson publisher/curator.
The line-up includes zine scene heavyweights like Slice Harvester, Birdsong Micropress, Put A Egg On It, and Ayun Halliday’s East Village Inky, plus local pillars Desert Island, ABC No Rio. Plus food music and more.
The First Annual Brooklyn Zine Fest takes place Sunday, April 15 from 11am to 6pm at Public Assembly, 70 North 6th St. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Admission is free!
The book is a practical guide to using graphic design for positive community transformation. It's filled with a ton real world projects that become a template for a set of strategies that students, educators, and professional designers can use to develop their own socially conscious project and make a positive impact on the world!
More information can be found on the Designing For Social Change site HERE.
I'm judging My Planet's photo contest this month! Share your quirkiest nature photos for a chance to win my new book Unstuck. Don't delay, the deadline is the end of this week! Find all of the details HERE.
Posters for The Red Flag Campaign by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance.
The book is filled to the brim with inspiring work, case studies, essays, and interviews. Definitely check it out if you have any interest in how design can be used for doing more than just selling consumer good.
FYI How Books will also be publishing my own book on socially conscious design: The Design Activist's Handbook, which I co-authored with Michelle Taute, this September! More details soon...
The New York Times interviewed me on the art I recently created for the world premiere production of Tennessee Williams final full-length play In Masks Outrageous and Austere, which is going up next month at The Culture Project in NYC...
For their most recent season my longtime client, Target Margin Theater, has chosen to focus on works by some early 20th century Russian avant-garde artists, so we've been referencing the aesthetic of that period with their marketing materials as well. The Last Futurist Lab brochure is inspired by several points of reference, most specifically Constructivist propaganda posters and Suprematist art, particularly the work of Kazimir Malevich. Rather than recreate or update a specific piece of work, I created a new image blending several tropes of the era...
Some of our previous Target Margin work can be found HERE and HERE.
For the past several years I've designed and illustrated the multi-use poster/mailers for New Georges theater productions in NYC. Their most recent show, Nightlands, is about race-relations in the 1960's. Since astrology plays a large part in the storyline we decided I should create a groovy star chart referencing a variety of visual elements in the show as the new zodiac symbols, with the two main characters floating in space between them, perhaps about to be come new constellations...
See other recent New Georges designs HERE and HERE.
They wanted a simple icon that would fit in with the recent rebranding I did for them and could function both as a standalone element or be used in conjunction with their logo.
The Red Flag Campaign has been named as a finalist for the first-ever Avon Communications Awards: Speaking Out About Violence Against Women. The Communications Award recognizes campaigns and organizations around the world for outstanding use of communications to end violence against women.
The Red Flag Campaign is a project of the Virginia Sexual & Domestic Violence Action Alliance, and is one of five nominees in the “Break the Silence” award category for outstanding communications materials that encourage individuals or communities to step in and speak out against violence against women. Nineteen organizations from countries including Vietnam, Spain, Australia, Montenegro, Japan, Canada, India and Rwanda were nominated for awards in four categories. Five of the nineteen nominees are headquartered in the U.S.
The winners were announced at the 2nd World Conference of Women’s Shelters in Washington, D.C.
I was commissioned to create this photo illustration for Page 73's recent production Lidless in NYC.
The play is about the reunion of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and a soldier that worked there at the same time, but has since medicated away her memories of her experiences. We needed an image that represented this intense story without turning off the audience with violent images and at the same time avoiding making it seem like a play about prescription drug abuse.
We decided that orange fabric (the color of Gitmo jump suits) could be used to represent the hidden past that comes exploding from the torn open head of the solider.
Ma-Yi Theater Company commissioned me to create this photo illustration for their recent production The Sugar House on The Edge of The Wilderness.
The show, which is about two teenage adoptees dealing with loss and survival in NYC, is a sort of modern day fairy tale loosely based on Hansel and Gretel. We wanted to express the grittiness of the world in which they live and how their lives have been fractured by their experiences, thus the decision to create a piece out from discarded photos on an actual New York street.
I started with a portrait of two of the actors in the show provided by the theater, which I broke into dozens of individual overlapping pieces digitally and then printed out individually. I then physically remade the image, like a giant jigsaw puzzle, placing the photos directly on a sidewalk in Brooklyn amidst some genuine NYC trash!
This past December my friends at O&M Co. once again asked me to create their holiday gift...
This year they wanted to include a CD single of an original recording of Silent Night/11 O'Clock News. So we decided I would create a set of limited edition prints inspired by the song as well as The Mountaintop, the Broadway show about Martin Luther King Jr. that they are currently promoting.
Each print featured an original snowflake made and a quote from MLK, and were stacked in a box with the CD attached to a final panel with the credits hidden underneath.
They were hand silkscreened in silver and white ink on black paper by the fine folks at Team Eight, who have printed all of the previous O&M holiday promotions as well.
You can see the 2010 Spider-Man inspired gift I created for O&M HERE.
ALR was recently asked to rebrand Fractured Atlas, the venerable nonprofit business services organization for artists.
For many years the company had used a logo that was a literal interpretation of their name, with the image of Atlas carrying a fractured Earth. However, many people interpreted it as implying the organization had roots in Ayn Rand-ian philosophy, which couldn't be further from the truth.
With a mandate of helping the organization to appear more modern, while erasing the existing misconceptions, we developed a logo that reframes the company name in terms of what they're doing: helping to fix a world that is already fractured.
We were specifically asked to create something that positioned them as an innovative organization, that was at the same time both approachable and dependable. And since their audience consists of a diverse range of artists (both visual and performing) it was important to create something broad enough to encompass everyone.
The resulting logo features a stylized compass rose which signifies that Fractured Atlas, not only acknowledges that the system is broken, but provides navigation & direction, blazing a trail through the mire.The multifaceted icon, which could imply the literal pieces of the fractured atlas, can also be seen as a representation of the diverse audience and the various creative directions in which they are going. The solid, strong square at the middle gives a sense of order to something that would otherwise be chaotic.
We also developed an updated stationery system for them, with the logo playfully bleeding off of the letterhead, and their tagline "Liberate the Artist" in bold text on the back of their business cards.
In addition to the logo we provided a visual update for their website. The challenge here was that the existing backend could not be dramatically changed, so a skin had to be designed that could create an entirely new look based on this updated branding, while conforming to a fairly rigid set of technical and structural parameters. The colors of the logo were used to break up the site into visually distinct sections, that made it easier to navigate the vast amount of information contained within.
Happily they've received immediate praise for the new look, when they reached out to the membership about it via their blog shortly after it was launched.
Find out more about Fractured Atlas and see their rebranding in action on their site HERE.
