Geoff Peveto, curator of Rock Paper Show, president of the American Poster Institute and partner in The Decoder Ring, an Austin based design collective, will be available to discuss the history of Flatstock and the steady growth of the gig poster community. Featured Rock Paper Show artists Hero, Mat Daly, Strawberryluna, Vahalla, and Tara McPherson will all be available to sign copies, as well as Holly Gressley of Rumors, the book’s designer, and Mike Treff from Soundscreen Design, the book’s publisher and producer.

Rock Paper Show: Flatstock Volume One
The Strand: 828 Broadway at 12th Street
June 4th, 7pm

Information about the event is available on the Rock Paper Show site.

More about the book:
Rock Paper Show documents the first decade of the twenty-first century as the high-water mark in the storied intersection of graphic design and music. Against the backdrop of the digital- music revolution, the rock poster reemerged during this period as the calling card of impossibly talented new artists and design studios brought up on Black Flag, Joy Division, the Flaming Lips, and the Melvins. Simultaneously, the posters that these studios produced were celebrated by a rapidly growing nation of indie-rock fans who all woke up one day craving beautiful new music-related objects in their lives. The excitement—matched equally in the design and music worlds—was captured by and celebrated via the birth and rapid rise of Flatstock, the American Poster Institute’s ongoing rock-poster exhibition.

Since its inception in 2002, Flatstock has evolved into the definitive showcase of the most talented poster artists working today. Rock Paper Show: Flatstock Volume One is an editorial and visual history of the first 20 Flatstocks, with contributions from the artists and studios that regularly attend the events and the bands who are often the subjects of the posters, as well as critics and collectors involved in this community. Rock Paper Show collects for the first time the original posters created for each Flatstock by the attending studios. Veteran poster-makers take the reader on behind-the-scenes looks at the studios, the artists, the regional scenes, and the personalities of this vibrant and varied community.

Thanks to Aviva Michaelov at the New York Times Op-Ed page for inviting us to create an Op-Chart this Memorial Day. For this piece, about how the use of DNA technology has allowed the military to identify the remains of each of the unknown soldiers from Vietnam on, we created a paper flower wreath to memorialize the death of the soldiers that died in each war. The size of each flower is (roughly) proportional to the total number of soldiers lost in each war.

Thanks goes to master crafters Cara Brower and Sarah Lutkenhaus, who helped mastermind the flower making for three days straight. A few progress shots follow the jump.

We started out with rough sketches to establish the composition. Here we tried out a few flower ideas with recycled paper.

Cara and Sarah researched paper flower designs and tested them out until we found a few that worked.

We also experimented with several colors and printed background textures to create a subtle environment for the wreath that would translate to newsprint.

We shot the real wreath multiple times over the course of several days, adjusting the composition and adding additional flowers to get the proportions right. When it came to assembling the final wreath, we came up with some fun workarounds to get the flowers properly positioned.

We celebrated the pre-launch of Rock Paper Show, a book we designed in collaboration with Soundscreen Design and the American Poster Institute, at the Flatstock festival at South by Southwest this past weekend.

Rock Paper Show is a history of the Flatstock festival, featuring interviews and essays by artists, collectors and bands, and a compilation of the posters created for the first 20 Flatstocks. The deluxe edition features 20 original limited edition prints created for the book by prominent poster-makers from the festival. It was truly a pleasure to meet all of the wonderful folks from Flatstock and the API, and see this long-running project finally come into fruition.

Below, some photos from Soundscreen’s booth at Flatstock and a few sneak peeks of the new book. The book will be officially released in June, so stay tuned for more events this spring.

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Bidoun

The new issue of Bidoun magazine is out on the shelves. We took over the art direction with this issue; there are many noticeable changes, but the key transformation was in the typography. We went with Lyon, the handsome & versatile Granjon-esque serif designed by our good friend Kai Bernau, equally handsome & versatile.

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Week in Review

Also: We were asked by Kelly Doe at the New York Times to develop an illustration accompanying the article “America’s Identity Crisis” (not the final headline), contextualizing the recent debates over curriculum ideologies.

Incidentally, this piece was drawn on a chalkboard slate, for which we spent half the day hunting. The slate, roughly 4 x 6′, was acquired from a friendly Father at a parish in Greenpoint. The Catholic school on the premises, St Cecilias, had recently been closed due to a slowly dwindling Catholic population, and some of the classroom chalkboards had been disassembled, slab by slab. After picking through the selection, we found one of ideal size and took it back to the office (not without struggle, either, the thing’s as heavy as a house). Upon propping it up, we realized it still had writing left on it:

St Cecilias Forever

Unused concept for an article on warring textbook ideologies.

After 18 months of work, we’re truly proud to launch the website for Commercial Type, a new type foundry conceived by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz. We don’t like playing favorites with our kids, but this one is close to our hearts. Check it out and buy fonts! Thank you Brana, Christian, Abi, and Berton for all your hard work and Kai for your support.

To celebrate, we splurged on a really nice bottle of champagne. A new website launch tradition?

Who are we kidding, websites are never ever done. Photo by Chad.

We designed a Boxing Day themed puzzle for the Op-Ed page. Check it out today (they’re tougher than they look!).

As promised, here are some of our favorite moments from the studio’s west coast tour. Jump on in…

Our first stop was San Fransisco. We spent the first day working (when it was sunny ) and the second day out on the town (when it was raining).

Jon Sueda, our friend and host, has an amazing studio space (which he graciously let us work in— thanks Jon!) and shares with Martin Venezky. The photo above is of Martin’s desk area. I love the triangles.

We gave our first talk at CCA. Here’s the crowd:

The next day we splurged on an amazing lunch at Chez Panisse, Alice Water’s restaurant in Berkley. Here’s a crummy iPhone photo of some of the world’s best food:

Post-lunch Andy and I discovered a red bridge inside of a cloud…

…and Holly had her aura photographed.

Then we all went to a Karaoke bar in the Mission. We woke up the next day and flew to LA.

Hertz gave us Prius. It runs silent under 5mph. Here we are at the airport figuring out how to turn it on. It took the three of us 20 minutes.

We were starving so we immediately drove it to the Beverly Hills Hotel Fountain Coffee Room which was recommended to us by Zack.

At the end of the night we ended up at a place called The Smell in Skid Row. They have some amazing graffiti:

The rest of our time in LA is kind of a blur, so I’m going to jump out of the narrative and just list the rest of the highlights.

We saw Real Life, a book we designed, at Ooga Booga LA’s most awesome bookstore

We spotted this gem at the GOOD Magazine office:

And took a lot of photos from the window of our car. Like this one:

This one too (so much smog!):

Our friend Leon threw us a picnic! Thank you!

Victoria took us to the HMS Bounty and showed us around the studio she works at, on top of The Wiltern. Check out the view:

Victoria rules. She drove all the way out to Valencia to see our talk at CalArts. Here’s a shot of the crowd. Thanks Caroline Park and Mark Owens for hosting and inviting us!

And shout outs to the students in the front row who blogged about us.

All the grad students had this 8.5×11 posted at their desks:

We went to In-n-Out. Doesn’t hold a candle to shake shack, but still delicious.

We also gave a workshop and talk at Otis. Here’s Erin Hauber and Riah Buchanan setting things up in their class.

Otis is great, none of the classrooms have a 4th wall. Thank you Erin, Riah, and Davey for inviting us to your class. The following day we went to visit Erin & Davey’s studio, which is a storefront in Chinatown.

LA Chinatown is not like NY Chinatown.

My last night in LA my friend Jacob took me to the Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck. Amazing. If you’re ever in LA, find this truck!

Obviously, we had a blast. A huge thank you goes out to everyone to invited us, hosted us, and took us out. Hope to see you all in New York soon!