Design

WE ARE: HARDLAND/HEARTLAND
This is a loose facade, a fictional reality. The guise of our creative freedom — a p***a********** vision from the Midwest. The work created is biographical fantasy. We look through this lens, and it makes sense. To us. We’re Live! Broadcasting to you the end of the beginning in Hi-Quad-Defined-Large-Antiquated-Definiton. It should already be just inside your brain. Don’t you see? These are short bursts of information. British Television Advertisements — You love them.

Tired & True. Blech.

WE CAME FROM:
The map between the mountains — mostly coastless. Graveled roads and gangster rap cassette tapes in suede skate shoes. Trials, tribulations and trouble. They made numerous movies about where we came from. Pre-Internettal Youth. Mickey Mouse was huge.

WE DO:
We make things. Total creationists. This all started with drawings, lines were made to be finished by another. We have called it facilitated collaboration from time to time, but we try to not be boring. We try to have fun. Your resulting experience should be most pleasurable and at times quite confusing: We have tried our best to embellish and imbue these narrative explosions with meaning. Sometimes we do not.

WE WANT:
The (B)est (T)imes (O)f (O)ur (L)ives (E)ver. SRSLY. The Organ House forever ending.

There is a “we” — did you know this?
We are trying to take you there.

Self-interview commissioned by the Walker Art Center Design Blog.

These two posters, recently found deep within one of our flat file drawers, demonstrate an unusual application of the Walker commissioned typeface designed by Matthew Carter.

These intriguing posters were somewhat of a mystery until recently when we discovered (with some investigative help from a former member of the Walker studio) that each poster was designed by a Japanese designer in collaboration with Carter for use in an exhibition of Carter’s work. Titled, Matthew Carter’s Type Game: A New Identity of the Walker Art Center, this exhibition took place in 1997 at the Morisawa Typography Space in Tokyo, Japan.

Design: Yutaka Satoh

Design: Kouga Hirano

CalArts is a small school. With a population that averages around 1332 students in 6 different departments that include: Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film-Video, Music, and Theater, each department is its own intimate microcosm. Its faceted nature is eerily similar to the Walker’s own interdisciplinary model, both sharing many of the same departments. The campus is basically a one building compound composed of bits and pieces that form their own semblance of a whole that evokes Lawrence Weiner’s work on the face of the Barnes Building. This unity makes walking around CalArts a frenetic fission of dancers, designers, artists, filmmakers, composers, choreographers, vocalists, dogs (CalArts is a dog friendly campus), and of course posters. They are made by all stripes of students, from those announcing their own shows and performances to figuring out a summer sublet.

But the smart ones get a graphic designer to design and silk-screen their posters. There is a long tradition of the second year Masters students in Design producing all the posters for the Visiting Artists and Designers that frequent CalArts so often. The MFA candidate class of 2008 is currently selling groups of posters on Ebay for those of you who lust for tactility and Day-Glo or metallic inks.If you are interested in taking in more of the history of the posters at CalArts then go take a look at the web version of the exhibition and catalogue for Earthquakes and Aftershocks: Posters from the CalArts Graphic Design Program 1986-2004 edited by Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié with Texts by Michel Bouvet, Jeff Rian, Louise Sandhaus, Somi and Sojin Kim, Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié and a delightful book design by Yasmin Khan and Jon Sueda.

The last 4 years of Insights design lectures are
available to watch online at the Walker Channel.

Ed Fella

Project Projects

Work Worth Doing

Marian Bantjes

Jop van Bennekom

Stuart Bailey, Michael Bierut, Debbie Millman

Daniel Eatock

Chip Kidd

Armand Mevis

Bill Grant

Wink

Blu Dot Design

Paul Sahre

Mooren & van der Velden

Antenna Design