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First Issue of the Poster Poster Magazine Features: - John Foster - Jan Batjlik - Poster for Tomorrow - Poster Monday 100 posters - Masters Advice
Citation preview
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I S S U E O N E / A U G U S T 2 0 1 5
R i s i n g s t a R sJ a n B a J T L I K 2
Welcome to the very first edition of the Poster Poster Magazine. It’s taken us longer than expected to put this first number together, but we wanted to do right by you, and we’ve worked hard to bring you the first of hopefully many numbers to come.
PPMag was partially inspired by an earlier project from one of our Founders. Back in November 2009 Christopher Scott created a magazine called FAKE Plastic that ran for two years, producing 5 wonderful issues. Since then Christopher had the itch of doing a Magazine again, mostly due to his fondness for the editorial medium.
After a successful first year of Poster Poster we all discussed how to take our project to the next level and engage even more with our community. Many ideas were put on the table, but there was one that resonated with the entire team: A magazine.
And so we have launched PPMag, a biannual publication featuring exclusive interviews with some of the best poster designers in the world, competitions, poster news, promoting talented young rising stars of the poster world and much more.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have contributed to making this first issue; without their support this magazine would simply not exist. We hope the poster community enjoys this project as much as we have enjoyed making it. Please share your feedback with us and stay in touch. Poster Poster Magazine was created for you and we want you to make it your own.
Cheers,
Natalia Delgado & Christopher ScottPoster Poster [email protected]
HELLO,
EDITOR´S NOTE
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N A T A L I A D E L G A D OC H R I S T O P H E R S C O T T
EDITOR IN CHIEF
P A U L E T T E C A B R E R AART DIRECTION/GRAPHIC DESIGN
N A T A L I A D E L G A D OC H R I S T O P H E R S C O T T
D A N I E L H E R R E R AWRITERS
P A B L O D I F I R M AADVISOR
Poster Poster
A project by
R i s i n g s t a R sJ a n B a J T L I K 4
R I S I N G S T A R S
JAN BAJTLIK
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I N T E R V I E W
P O S T E R F O R T O M O R R O W
3 6
F E A T U R E
J O H N F O S T E R
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CON-
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P O S T E R M O N D A Y
1 0 0 P O S T E R S
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M A S T E R S A D V I C E
W H A T I S T H E P O S T E R ?
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TENTS
R i s i n g s t a R sJ a n B a J T L I K 6
On their way to becoming Poster Masters, this section showcases the Rising Stars: Talented young Designers that we believe will be making a huge impact to the world of Posters. Whether they are creating amazing design work, teaching workshops around the world, or organizing cool events, these young designers are definitely leaving their mark.
For this first issue of PPMag we have chosen a gifted young designer from Poland: Jan Bajtlik. Read on to learn more about why this young designer is one to keep your eyes on.
Meet Rising Star
Interview by Christopher Scott
Jan Bajtlik
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Jan Bajtlik
R i s i n g s t a R sJ a n B a J T L I K 8
an Bajtlik (born 1989, Master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2013, currently PHD student of graphic department)is a member of the Polish Association of Applied Graphic Designers (STGU). He designs children’s books, posters, illustrations, fonts, visuals identifications for cultural events and conducts typography workshops for children. He is the author of the activity book for children about typography and creative scribbling Typo-scrawler, published by the Dwie Siostry Publishing and recepient of the special mention in the Bologna Ragazzi Award 2015.
He illustrates among others for Time Magazine, The New York Times and Gazeta Wyborcza. He has held 15 solo exhibitions, participated in nearly 85 group exhibitions and has received numerous awards in national and international graphic competitions, including a silver medal for the poster Remember at the 10th International Poster Triennial in Toyama, Japan, an honourable mention in the Book of the Year 2011 competition organised by the Polish Section of IBBY for a children´s book Europe According to Penguien Popo, a honourable mention in the 12th Poster Biennial in Mexico and was awarded a Ministry of Culture scholarship Mloda Polska 2014. He is also a three-time prize-winner of the Skopje International Poster Festival. He has worked with talented designers such as Paweł Althamer and Michel Bouvet.
Jan is a keen traveler and rock climber. He lives and works in Warsaw.
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R i s i n g s t a R sJ a n B a J T L I K 10
“...creating a poster is just like sending one strong message screaming to people”.
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What do you like best about creating posters?
The most satisfying is a play with the form of communication. I like to observe how peoplereact when they see the poster, especially on the street. Also the fact that author is not visible himself. We can recognise him by his style but there is no any relationship like it is between the audience and actor or musician performing on the stage.
What can you tell us about your process?
With all of my works: posters, illustrations and books I start to work on with a small sketch drawing. It’s very helpful. Sometimes I have a final idea already when client explains the task. Sometimes it takes many days to come up with an idea. There is no one rule. Many things happen just be chance and you have to use this chance in a good way. Designing of a single poster is a short term process. Things are different when you work on the whole identification system and poster is only a part of it. Now I’m interested more in a long process projects, requiring some research like for example in book design.
My diploma work (MSc degree“Typogryzmol” / eng. “Typoscrawler”, published by Dwie Siostry Publishing in May 2014) is based on experience I had gained during many typographic and art workshops with children of different age as well
as parents and teachers at schools and cultural institutions in Poland. Some of this workshops were addressed to socially marginalised children and families. The published version of the book is enriched thanks to consultations with educators, psychologists and librarians. During design process you can observe variety of cultural and social aspects. Now I’m working on several versions of this book in other languages (for foreign publishers) so, again you face new contexts and problems. I’m very interested in research process and a way of thinking repersented in MA TypefaceDesign (course director: Gerry Leonidas) at Typography & Graphic Communication Department at University of Reading. In comparison to such process creating a poster is just like sending one strong message screaming to people.
How do you find your inspiration?
From everywhere.
What similarities or connections do you find between your work illustrating children’s books and creating your posters?
I’m trying to work in similar way in all fields. I do my best. I do what I like. I do my job.
What advice would you give to young designers like you or younger (who might still be in school)?
Don’t be satisfied too easily and think “how can I do it better”? Love what you do, have fun,take a risk.
What are your future plans?
I don’t have any big concrete plans. We will see. I would like to do next big book.
What’s coming? What can we expect next?
I would prefer not to revile my plans for now.
Don´t be satisfied too easily and think, “how
can I do it better”?
“”
R i s i n g s t a R sJ a n B a J T L I K 12
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I do my best.I do what I like.
I do my job.
f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 14
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John Foster
Often referred to as the ‘King of Poster Design’, John Foster is the principal and superintendent of Bad People Good Things LLC. A world-renowned designer, and illustrator, John is also the author of several books including New Masters of Poster Design, Volumes One and Two, 1000 Indie Posters. Kindly sharing his time with PPMag John sat down with us for an interview to talk about his work, his books, and his ever evolving relationship with poster design.
Interview by Natalia Delgado
f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 16
How did your
relationship with posters
begin?
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...and how has it grown over time?
I’ve always had a love of posters; I think most designers would have a love of posters given the large format and the chance to make a big splash. It’s one of the larger applications of our skills available out there. I started doing posters back in college for my bands or my friends’ bands or different social issues and all of those sorts of things. I was pretty enamoured with it and then the poster kind of disappeared around that time through a number of different avenues, whether it was the advent of blast emails or the enactment of papering laws that knocked down poster scenes that used to exist in urban areas. You used to get these $100 fines for every poster you put up and stuff like that, so they basically went away all together. I actually went to work for a small studio, my first design studio job, specifically because the owner was one of the big poster designers in the DC area and I loved all of his work. I was pretty shocked to find out that he hadn’t done a poster in 2 years. When I got there I kept thinking he was trying to keep all of the jobs for himself and he wasn’t letting me tackle one. I was like, “when are you going to let me design a poster”? He was quick to reply; “I don’t do posters anymore, those are all blast emails and mini sites and that’s what we’re doing now”! I felt really strongly about it so I started volunteering to make posters for things where maybe I could see that they could really benefit from them. So it kept me going and I continued finding reasons to work in that format. As I was doing that, I started to discover that there were other people around the world that were kind of doing the same thing and were trying to keep this part of design alive and help the poster survive and even thrive and find different ways to apply it. So the poster wasn’t really what it was in the 70’s, or 80’s even, but it was this sort of new version of what the poster could be and turning it into different things. I sort of fell in love with it all over again and I really fell in love with the whole idea behind the passion these other people had. Basically all of us were designing
JOHN
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SPLASHBIG
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SPLASHBIG THE
CHANCE TO MAKE A
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posters for no good reason, just completely in the face of adversity. It’s kind of exciting now that in the last 5-10 years posters have become the celebrated medium again. There were very few of us that were keeping the fire burning in the 90’s for this thing, but it’s been pretty amazing to see it come back with a vengeance.
Cool, that’s awesome. You were also curating, is that right, at the University of Maryland?
Yes, that’s just ended, but I was curating the poster collection there. We were in the process of building a screen printing collection in the gallery there so I was helping to curate that. Then I have been lucky enough to curate different collections at different times for galleries and exhibitions and obviously with all the books, those are all curated collections as well. From finding those like-minded souls in all the corners of the world, the internet really made that possible. You start to see that maybe there are only three people doing posters in all of Washington DC but there is also seven people in Frankfurt doing it and three people in Buenos Aires doing the same thing and you start to connect all these dots together and before you know it there is 100, 200, 300 people growing and doing these things even though they all seem isolated in their own towns. I thought it was really important then to show that and share what was happening so I started aggressively curating collections to bring the finest work to different people’s attention. That’s kind of how I started writing the books as well. I just wanted to get that message out there.
That was my next question actually, about the books. I am guessing it is this love of posters that made you decide to create a book on the poster masters?
Yes. With New Masters of Poster Design, it was a weird thing. I had written a book before
Basically all of us were designing posters...
“
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for no good reason, just completely in the face ofadversity.”
that about page layout and it had some poster design in there. Actually nobody wanted to do that book, nobody wanted to do New Masters of Poster Design. I took it around to a ton of different publishers and no one was interested. Everyone had told me that poster books don’t sell, nobody cares about posters, no one is doing posters anymore. One publisher and one editor were willing to take a chance on me and I kept telling them, “this is really happening at an underground grassroots level, but this is happening”. It may only be one person in China who is doing amazing work, but it is going on and it is growing and if we start documenting this now, by the time the book comes out, we are going to be a year later and this is going to be - for lack of a better word - a really hot design scene. I think this is where the best work is being done in the design world. Luckily, they shared my vision and the onus was on me at that point to make sure that I got the best possible designers. So, when you are doing that, you have to get the best person in Iran, it can’t even be the best person at that moment, you have to figure out who is going to be the best person a year or a year and a half from now when the book actually comes out so that the book has credibility. If you’re only featuring 30 people from the entire world, you have to make sure it is the right 30 people. Luckily, they had faith in me, and I, through some mix of knowledge and luck and skill, selected the right people and they told the right stories and we got the right work out of there and it ended up being a really successful book. They did different pressings in five different countries and it was sort of all over the place. So that was kind of the beginning of letting everybody know that this was happening. By that time it was really above ground, you had gigposters.com, Rene Wanner’s site, it had become a bigger scene at all the Flatstock events. The international biennales and those things had been chugging along but they were getting more entries and the entries were better than they had been in decades. You were seeing these different poster design scenes crop up all over the place, so it was a cool time.
f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 22
You kind of already answered my next question, but maybe you could go a little bit further. I was wondering what the process is for selecting the designers, but you kind of already addressed that. Did you first select the designers and then pitch the book, or first pitch the book and then select the designers?
It was a mix of it. I had a handful already picked because I had to pitch the book and show them some work from the people that I had. I think once we started really talking about it we wanted to make sure it was international in scope so the hardest part was really with the limited number of slots - which I made intentional so that it was really an exclusive group - I needed to have the fullest range of work and I also needed to include as many top level people as I could from all across the world. That might mean that there was only going to be one person from Mexico, one person from China and maybe two people from Poland and one from Switzerland. That’s when it got really intense, because at the time there were probably seven people in Switzerland that I thought were amazing, but who did I think was the best of the best from that country? Also, who did I think was going to be doing the most amazing work a year and a half later? So it was trying to figure those kinds of things out. It was a mix, curating after the fact, but getting those extra international profiles was pretty intense.
And the designers were open to it? Did you have any trouble getting the designers to collaborate with you?
I’m trying to think. I do think there was one person who turned me down. There were two people actually that turned me down that I wanted to profile in New Masters of Poster Design. One of them was holding all of their things for their own book, so they didn’t want to share that way. That was kind of heart breaking because it was a total hero of mine, basically one of the three people I got into design because
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f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 24
of, so I would have loved to have profiled them. It actually worked out being fine because in a way it was better if it wasn’t all known names; it was better to spring new talent on people. Also, once that happened, that’s how I started to move it more towards the idea of ‘new masters’ of poster design and really focus on new talent rather than having it be just established people. Then one person who turned me down the first time ended up being featured in Volume II, so it worked out. I think they needed to see that I was a proven quantity. They weren’t trusting in just letting their story be told by someone who had only written one book before. So after they saw that the first one was so well received, then they were more open to being involved.
As you were saying then, the success of the first book opened a lot of doors for you in terms of creating the second book and creating more books.
Yes. It wasn’t a massive hit, but it was a hit. If you have a hit record, if you have a top 10 song, you keep making music for the next 10 years. So I was able to continue writing. After that there was still interest in a built up audience at the right time and it opened some different doors. By the time I wrote that book I had already been doing a lot of speaking engagements for years, so it didn’t really open up things in that regard. But it was kind of interesting that I had gone from being this guy who was print-centric and fairly modern with my aesthetic, but most of what my talks would be would be about creativity and outworking other people and then I became the poster guy all of the sudden. It was kind of funny because there were books that I had ideas for and I pitched and I had publishers come back to me and say they would rather I just do a poster book because at least they knew it would sell a certain amount, it was a proven thing. At some point I just kind of embraced it. I was a poster guy at heart, so I might as well be a poster guy in practice.
“ I J U S T W A N T E D T O G E T T H E M E S S A G E O U T T H E R E . ”
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You created the book on the indie posters as well?
Yes, I did the 1000 Indie Posters. That was funny, my publisher, who I had written some of the other books for, was doing this whole series on “1000” so it was like “1000 postcards”, “1000 business cards”, “1000 brochures” and this sort of thing. They said, “we are going to do ‘1000 Posters’ and we would really like you to do it”. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it because I felt like 1000 posters was a lot and I was known for doing these really tightly curated collections of 100-150 pieces max and oftentimes smaller, the gallery things were like 30 pieces. I knew I could find 1000 pieces, but I didn’t want to dilute the quality of what I was doing so I said, “give me a little bit of time, I need to investigate it and see if I feel like the 999th piece that goes in this thing is still going to be pretty amazing”. If there is enough work out there…but I quickly found that I still had to exclude work that I thought was great that couldn’t even fit in the book. It was the right time for that book as well because that was when there was really a boom and a lot of people were involved in poster design that hadn’t been doing it before. At the point that book came out, anybody that was worth watching in design I think, was involved in poster design and their best work was being done in poster design, so it was a good time to highlight that amount of work.
So it really all comes back to curating for you, whether it is books or exhibitions. What would you say was the most exciting part of this curating and the most challenging part of the curating process?
The most exciting part is sharing work with people that they are not aware of. I love nothing more than to see people who early on in their careers I was able to give them extra exposure and watch them rocket to the design stratosphere and become design superstars and get opportunities to do international branding
f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 26
and many different things. Obviously, they would have eventually gotten there, but I like to think I maybe sped up the process a little bit for them and got them there a little bit sooner. I like nothing more than that, to be able to share with as many people as possible how amazing the work some of these people are doing is and sing their praises. That part is always really exciting. I think the challenging part, when it comes down to it, is still down to what my opinions are and what my aesthetic is. So there are certainly people out there who are incredibly successful poster designers and who I think are really great craftsmen and I would never deny how amazing their posters are as far as they are put together, but maybe their style of design isn’t something that excites me, or I feel like I have seen it before. It’s just simply down to a subjective opinion versus what I find appealing and what I don’t. I think that’s the hardest part, where I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to make some of these definitive books about poster design, I do feel guilty. There are people that I think are talented and if someone else put them in a book I wouldn’t dispute it, if that makes sense, but they are not right for my collection. So that’s kind of a heavy weight. People I really respect as designers have made side comments about how they would never be in a “John Foster book” or whatever, thinking that I think poorly of their work, which isn’t the case. Maybe their work is just not the right thing…
…for your selection.
Yeah. Especially with the gigposter side of things, I think that has been really hard. Luckily there became other outlets because once publishers saw that a poster book could be successful again, they started opening the doors to all kinds of different things so people started doing ‘the art of modern rock and gig posters’ and all those kind of things started to spill out from there. So there was an opportunity for those kinds of designers to get exposure as well, it just wasn’t going to come from me.
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“I think the challenging part, when it comes down to it, is still down to what my opinions are and what my aesthetic is”.
f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 28
“IF yOU WANT TO cURATE A cOllEcTION, yOU HAvE TO APPEAl TO A cERTAIN SIzE OF AN AUDIENcE TO DO THAT...”
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I’m very interested in this idea of the content curation. I am an educator and I teach portfolio as one of my classes, which involves a lot of self curating and looking at student work. I find it interesting in your case because it has been sort of a professional practice which is not all that common in graphic design, it is more associated with the arts. So I was wondering, do you see this as a new area where designers could thrive in terms of content curation? There seems to be a growing trend.
You know, I don’t know. It becomes a very small, narrow, exclusive field just by its nature. A curator is going to have to be somebody at this top level who is culling through hundreds of thousands of examples of work that is out there. A lot of people who I think are really talented designers, I don’t necessarily think that their overall aesthetic…I don’t know how I can phrase this exactly... A lot of people are too narrow in their tastes to be quality curators. Also I think they are also too narrow in their tastes and their style of design to appeal to the audience that would need to be necessary as a curator. That might make them really successful as a designer or an illustrator because clients are coming specifically for that one thing, but that’s one client. If you want to curate a collection, you have to appeal to a certain size of an audience to do that, otherwise you are just putting it together for yourself. I always have that in mind. The collection I would put together for myself might just be 20 pieces just by one designer because that is what I love. But if I want to put together a collection where I am going to expose everybody to that kind of work that I love and other kinds of work that I love, maybe you need to open it up and look at other countries you haven’t been exposed to before or be open to different kinds of work being seen side by side while still holding your level of quality together and your viewpoint on it. It’s not something I expected to do or something I even knew that I had a talent for, I just kind of was given the opportunity to do some of these things
f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 30
and when I was successful with it I was given more opportunities to do it. I look at it as a real privilege and an honour that these people trust me to be kind of the voice behind their work and to be out there flying their flag and that they are willing to be part of the collections I put together. I don’t take that for granted by any means. From a vocational viewpoint, I’m not sure how to answer your question. I’m not sure about how it exists in the field. It’s definitely a talent people either have or they don’t. It requires numerous different skills to all be together in the same person. You can’t just have a great eye, that’s not enough, but you have to have that. You can’t just have great communication skills, but not a great eye; those two things have to come together.
You have to be incredibly organized and then you have to have some hustle to put these things together as well. Then you also have to be almost like a motivational coach in the background making sure that people get you the work and making sure they feel good about the collection. Then you have to be a tireless promoter once the collection is actually put together. So I think there are very few people that have all those skills in one place. It is always going to be a small field. You’ll see with your students, maybe one of 100 students that passes through has three of the five things, you know? Maybe they can be taught to do the other two.
I have been a member of a couple of juries and it is similar to what you say in how the jury goes through their selection, especially if there are no parameters for selection, it can be very much personal taste rather than looking at the whole collection.
“how did you get that in there”?
31
Yes, I’ve juried a lot of competitions and you always see that. Sometimes it comes down to the dynamics. I think with anything like that, you know when you sit in the room, you look at it and the reality is that 75% of the work is so much better than everything else in the room that it doesn’t matter who is on the jury, that’s what’s going to get picked. But the last 25% is all down to personal choices and politics between the people and the dynamics of who has the most forceful personality and is putting their stamp on the process. So sometimes when you look at these collections and are like, “how did that get in there”? There are always a couple wild cards in there. People are always funny with that saying, “well, it’s just opinions, it’s just subjective”.
I think that’s kind of crap because when you sit in those rooms, you do realize that no matter what your aesthetics are and what you bring to the table, there is a certain level of execution and quality and especially concept in thinking that comes together in like I said, 75% of the pieces. So it doesn’t matter whether you like green or purple or that kind of illustration, it is just so good it’s going to get selected. But then you end up with the little bits that come after that and it’s funny because that’s what you end up arguing about in the selection process because there are the things that are the B projects sneaking into the A level.
“how did you get that in there”?
f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 32
You’re absolutely right. Besides the books and the curating, are you making any posters? Are you active on the poster scene or have you moved more into the other areas?
I still do posters. I never do enough of it. I never do as much of it as I want to do. I’m still doing the posters; I’m still doing off the wall projects. I work a lot with a record label in London, so I do a lot of poster work as part of that and the packaging design and help them with some A&R and other creative aspects. I’m still active in it but I’m not as active in promoting it. I was doing the poster of the week column for about a year and half or two years, so that was really great and it kept me as current as current could be. Somebody would do a poster and I was promoting it 30 minutes later so I was definitely really tapped in. I was sorry to see that come to an end, but I am still definitely involved.
As you have this great eye for what is hot and exciting, what are you excited about that is happening in the poster scene right now? What excites you, what are you finding interesting in terms of events or trends? We have all kinds of stuff that we cover on Poster Poster, from animated posters to all kinds of experimentation, projects, social design. What excites you?
I’m incredibly excited about the level of typography that has finally come in to the poster world. I think a lot of that has actually been a European focus, particularly from the Swiss and Polish designers, these really young people who are pushing the boundaries of what were pretty traditional poster scenes in their countries. A lot of the time they are doing it with one or two colour prints and sometimes it is just type. I always butcher his last name, but Felix Pfaeffli… I can send you a link, he is the best designer in the world right now and a lot of his projects are one colour, only using type sort of projects. I think that stuff really gets me excited. I like some of the things that are happening on the social poster front but I think it often results in…there are a lot of things in current poster design that I am not as excited
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about; This whole move towards real minimalist stuff that doesn’t have a sense of humour. I’m also not a big fan of what I think are sort of bootleg posters where people are selling off the back of big commercial properties like Batman or Star Wars or things that they really shouldn’t legally be doing. For portfolio pieces they are basically like student work, “here’s what I would do if I reimagined Batman”. That’s great to see as a student, but it isn’t great to see as something you are actually trying to sell in the marketplace. So that kind of stuff tends to bum me out. But in general I am excited that the poster scene is so vibrant and there are so many people that are still involved in it and still excited about it and into the poster as a whole. It’s really cool to see generation after generation getting swept into this and getting excited about the poster. I get excited about a lot of that stuff. Having said that, the poster seems to now be the place where the worst illustration in the world seems to live. 97% of the posters that I see are terrible, but the 3% are transcendent and otherworldly and the most amazing things ever, so it is worth wading through to get to that 3%.
What are your future plans? What’s coming? What can we expect from John Foster next?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I’m still chugging along, I’m still looking for different outlets to promote posters. Design still takes up a lot of my time. I took the last year off of writing because I ended up unintentionally writing two books at the same time and it was a little more... I was writing and designing two books at the same time and it was a little more than I really wanted to do. I’m writing another book about vintage graphic design tools, so that will happen, but I will probably get back into writing a more cutting edge book in the next year or two. I’m already pitching ideas with that. I’m still doing a ton of work for the music business and my regular client base and that kind of thing, so it has been a pretty good time. I’m super busy and I’m raising a 13 year old girl so that takes up like 99% of my time!
PUSHINGB O U N D A R I E S
f e a t u r eJ O H N F O S T E R 34
The 13 year old girl is way more than I can handle, that’s for sure.
Ok, well that’s everything. Is there anything else you would like to add?
I’m excited about what you guys are doing with the magazine and Poster Poster. Anything that helps promoting the poster, I’m definitely a massive fan of. It’s all really exciting stuff and it is amazing to me to think back to a time when I really felt that even in the United States there was maybe like 70 people who were really interested in poster design and trying to keep this thing alive. To now see it be what it is around the world is pretty incredible.
Like the phoenix that rises from the ashes.
Yeah, it really has. It still doesn’t make any sense. There is no reason. When the poster was being replaced by blast emails and that kind of thing, there was a reason that it was. If you had an event, you made an e-vite, you didn’t put a poster up in all the coffee shops. You had a little website or now you would do a Facebook event or that kind of thing. The fundamental reasons that we used to use posters for don’t exist any more and it is really incredible and only by the sheer determination of designers who refuse to let this thing die that we have made completely new applications for the poster. Whether it is for social causes or the poster now operating as one of the biggest pieces of merchandise in the music business. That didn’t exist, those were cheap t-shirts in the 70’s and 80’s, and those have been replaced by limited edition beautiful silkscreen prints. That’s now how you show everybody that you are a mega fan, you are one of only 50 people who has the poster from the show. It’s amazing, just amazing. Like I said, it’s only through the sheer determination of designers that the poster even exists any more, much less is thriving. It’s good, you guys are part of that, and it’s pretty incredible.
Thank you so much John, I really appreciate it.
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I WAS A POSTER GUY AT HEART...I MIGHT AS WEllBE A POSTER GUYIN PRACTICE”.
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P O S T E R FOR T O M O R R O W
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P O S T E R FOR T O M O R R O W
Interview by Christopher Scott
A cornestone of the poster world, Poster for Tomorrow has been working to make the world a better place since 2009. In this time they have held six editions of their poster competition, receving over 15,000 posters from 133 countries and hosted more than 400 exhibitions in 5 continents. We got the opportunity to sit down for a rare interview with Founder Hervé Matine to talk about the challenges, opportunities and future plans of the project.
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How do you choose the theme of the competition for each year?
Basically; our themes are as we already announced different articles of the universal decla-ration of Human rights. Mostly, one year before each deadline, we talk and decide which one to pick up.
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Where is PFT going? Accompanying all of us, together, through our rights, our fights and our future! As much as possible. Producing awareness! Provoking debates and sharing.
What have been some of the major challenges in your process?
To convince designers communities across the world to give brilliant answers, each year, to each of our briefs. More specifically the one in 2010 against the death penalty.
How is it like working with so many people all over the world?
Thanks to social network and internet, it’s perfectly looking like working in the same office! The only major difference is the time zones which requires to be more organized.
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RAISEAWARENESS
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RAISEAWARENESS
P O S T E R F O R T O M O R R O W 44i n t e r v i e w
What are the plans for the upcoming year?
Let’s wait and see!
What would you like to see happen?
Advice for people who want to create projects regarding social design?
More Unity, More peace! More tolerance! More happinessfor all.
To create most comprehensive, most creative and most powerful social designs all we need is to dig into the right knowledge sources! To make sure that we know perfectly enough about the topic that we want to work on! To be perfectly inspired and sensitive about! Keep permanently being innovative, simplifying, translating complexity to simple visual and objects.
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P O S T E R F O R T O M O R R O W 46i n t e r v i e w
PTMD
OEOA
SRNy
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Every Monday Poster Poster features great posters submitted by designers from all over the world in our weekly section Poster Monday. Thanks to the enthusiasm of the design community our collection keeps growing every week. For this first edition of PPMag we are delighted to share with you the first 100 posters that were featured in Poster Monday. We hope you are as inspired by them as we are!
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Abraham Méndez
Adrian Martin Dominguez
Alejandro Barbeito
Ali Delzendehrooy
Babak Bayrami
Augusto Zambonato
Alireza Nosrati
Andrew Mayberry
Ali Tomak
Byoung Il Sun
Carlos Bauer
Nicholas Pierre
Leandro Cepeda
Taber Calderon
Carlo Fiore
Behnam Raeesian
Mimmo Manes
Benoît Bodhuin
Charles Andara
Mariano “Coco” Cerrella
Peter Chmela
David Criado
Claudio Parentela
David Jimenez
Dragana Nikolic
David Jimenez (1)
Darío Cruz Silva
Denis Zaporozhan
Fabian Emmanuel Muñoz
Deniz Kürşad
Ferenc Kiss
Edwin Moreira Balladares
Taber Calderon
Davide Deusebio
Ethan Park
Fernando Horta
Gabriel Pulpo
Frank Guzmán
Gregory Bishop
Seyyed Mehdi Mousavi
Grzegorz Myćka
Hoon-Dong Chung
Hu Enming
Istvan Horkay
Hoseyn A. Zadeh
Jorge Eduardo Sanchez
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P O S T E R F O R T O M O R R O W 50i n t e r v i e w
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Lonnie Ruiz Gomez
Jan Sedmak
Jovana Jankovic
Taber Caldero (1)
Jordan Hu
Irina Goryacheva
Jovan Tarbuk
Julien Ponton
Katarzyna Zapart
Laurent Pinabel
Lauren Rolwing
Luis Yañez
Luis Rivera Rodriguez
Marija Gavrilović
Marco Tóxico
Marta Wapiennik
Mary Yudina
Mary Anne Pennington
Matthieu Salvaggio
Morteza Farahnak
Meysam namdar
Orhan Ardahanli
Taber Calderon (2)
Panagiotis Metallinos,
Pasquereau Nicolas
Piotr Olejarz
Adán Paredes Barrera
Rafael Lopez
Reza Mahboobi
Rick Cuenca
Roberto Gutierrez
Juan Pablo Dueñas Baez
Zhonghao Wu
Santiago Peralta
Sevgi Ari
Sha Feng
Slavimir Stojanovic
Citlali Medal Medellín,
Sven Lindhorst-Emme
Szymon Szymankiewicz
Steph Gio
Sonia Diaz /
Gabriel Martinez
William H. Haney
Tomaso Marcolla
Vincenzo Fagnani
Vladimir Vasić
Taber Calderon (3)
R i s i n g s t a R sJ a n B a J T L I K 52
TO yOU?
by Daniel Herrera
WHAT DOES THE POSTER MEAN
OUR MASTERS RESPOND
OUR MASTERS RESPOND
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WHAT DOES THE POSTER MEAN
OUR MASTERS RESPOND
W H A T I S T H E P O S T E R ?M A S T E R S 54
THE ROlE OF THE POSTER TODAY.
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We live in a fast world, where the economy, technology, politics and commerce have turned into living organisms that are in constant change, shaping society society on a daily basis. This “chaos” is the setting where design becomes a powerful ally to make these transformations as beneficial as possible. But within the wide spectrum of design objects, today I would like to bring the attention to the poster, this apparently harmless piece of paper that has its home on the city walls. Throughout history, the poster has taken part in some of the most important artistic movements of the time, such as the Art Noveau in France and the Russian Constructivism to mention a few. However, the role of the poster today is to many, a mystery. This is why the first question we always ask to each one of our Poster Masters is what the poster means to them. Today we want to share their answers with you. Maybe, by contemplating them together it will help you shape your own definition of what the poster means to you.
STEFAN S A G M E I S T E R
Well altogether sadly because I used to like this quite a bit myself I think it is dead. Most of the posters that I see and many of them that we do here and there are basically nostalgic meaning that they are done because designers still love to do them but there utility as far as medium of proper promotion or advertising is extremely compromised. You know considering when we can put some real thought into a small video that can get 100’s of thousands or maybe even millions of hits it is sort of difficult to justify to print a thousand posters and go through the problem of actually putting them up in a city. Most cities, most new cities specifically when it comes to cities in Asia and the United States are built for cult graphic and the poster obviously makes not a lot of sense in a city like that so that leaves us to a large extent to European cities and in many of those the culture poster because of the spaces are at a premium have been taking over by the commercial poster so which leaves us those little things that you know designers do for lecture posters or paper promotions and things like that and that is nice as a hobby but it is not really a real medium.
W H A T I S T H E P O S T E R ?M A S T E R S 56
INTERAcTIvE FORM OF cOMMUNIcATION BETWEEN
VIEW
ER
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VIEW
ER
For me first of all has the great scale so the proportions of a poster usually provide a wide canvas to communicate an idea. It is kind of the largest possible canvas that you can get in the print medium, it is something that the viewer can interact with whether they can look up close or at a distance; but basically it is an interactive form of communication between the viewer and the communicator. So I think that the medium itself is a very exciting form of the form itself.
cO
MM
UN
IcAT
OR
J A M E S V E R D E S O T O
W H A T I S T H E P O S T E R ?M A S T E R S 58
PETER B A N k O V
For me the poster is important because it is laboratory of modern design. I think the most interesting thing for me as a graphic designer I have found is the difference between professional and non-professional, between beautiful and ugly, between street culture and museum culture, between the East and the West.
MARIO F U E N T E S
The Poster is an Art that requires motivation, conviction, passion and a subtle touch of obsession, the poster is my modus vivendi and is part of me and my nature.
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PABlO k U N S T
I understand posters to be one of the most complete and complex graphic expressions that exist in the profession of graphic design. From its dimensions, which exceed the manually controllable supports, to its syntaxes, which demands both its conceptualization and its production, where different verbal and non-verbal signs intervene individually or collectively with the sole commitment to transmit, to a universe of different cultures and interpretations, one single message. Designing posters has for me, the challenge of trying to unify the understanding and comprehension of that which justifies its existence.
MOISES R O M E R O
For me it is a challenge in many ways. Posters allow me to express my thoughts about the reality that surrounds me and communicate in an effective way to a graphic language. I design posters because it is to transcend a life doing what I love to do. I bring all my passion in my work.
W H A T I S T H E P O S T E R ?M A S T E R S 60
EXPRESSf e e l i n g s , i d e a s a n d b e l i e f s
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EXPRESSf e e l i n g s , i d e a s a n d b e l i e f s
Poster is my favourite media of visual communication because with poster I can express my feelings, ideas, my beliefs. By designing social, political or ecological posters I believe I can make a difference or, at least, I can try.
D á l I D A k A R I C - H A D z I A H M E T O V I C
W H A T I S T H E P O S T E R ?M A S T E R S 62
MIlTON G L A S E R
I usually design posters when I am assigned a poster by an agency or by institution to convey information about an event or an attitude. What it means to me is a little more complex discerned, it means an opportunity to work on a large surface because one of the benefits of working on a poster is that it is significantly larger than most of the things you are ever asked to work on in the Graphic Arts field, so it gives you an area to work on that is more like a painting and such, and allows a little more graphic exploration very often.
yOSSI L E M E L
To be a poster designer is a mission, it is a definition of who you are. It is a way to express your feelings and thoughts, your ideas and your ideology. I have done it for 25 years. It is an obsession and way of life.
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ElMER S O S A
The poster for me is the heart of Graphic Design, in it you can show, apply and merge every single discipline that the graphic design proposes. Historically it has been said that the poster is one of the most efficient instruments of communication… I totally agree with that.
GöTz G R A M L I C H
Well I really love working on posters, it is some kind of closure design. You have one big page to communicate your idea and you can use everything in the design field like photography, typography, illustration, whatever.
W H A T I S T H E P O S T E R ?M A S T E R S 64
The poster is one of the main mediums of expression, where we deposit thoughts and feelings. In the academic world we say that the poster is the most complete and complex form of expression in graphic design; the poster is a mision and a challenge. It’s a space to store part of who and what we are; the poster is art, massive communication and experimentation, but above all the poster is the heart of design.
NICE AS A HOBBYEXPRESS MY THOUGHTS
A MYSTERY
LARGEST POSSIBLE CANVAS
VERY EXCITING FORM OF THE FORM ITSELF
CONCEPTUALIZATIONVERBAL AND NON-VERBAL SIGNS
MAKE A DIFFERENCEGRAPHIC LANGUAGEWIDE CANVAS TO COMMUNICATE AN IDEAWHO YOU ARE
NOSTALGIC
MASSIVE COMMUNICATIONSIGNIFICANTLY LARGERIT IS A CHALLENGE IN MANY WAYS
W h a t d o e s t h e p o s t e r m e a n t o y o u ?
HARMLESS PIECE OF PAPER
MOTIVATION, CONVICTION, PASSION AND A SUBTLE TOUCH OF OBSESSION
MODUS VIVENDIHEART OF GRAPHIC DESIGN
OPPORTUNITY TO WORK IN A LARGE SURFACE
A WAY OF LIFEEXPRESS MY BELIEFS
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LARGEST POSSIBLE CANVASCONCEPTUALIZATIONVERBAL AND NON-VERBAL SIGNS
MAKE A DIFFERENCEGRAPHIC LANGUAGEWIDE CANVAS TO COMMUNICATE AN IDEA
W h a t d o e s t h e p o s t e r m e a n t o y o u ?
DESIGNERS LOVE THEM
CHAOSHARMLESS PIECE OF PAPER
MOTIVATION, CONVICTION, PASSION AND A SUBTLE TOUCH OF OBSESSION
MODUS VIVENDIMY NATURE
BETWEEN THE EAST AND THE WEST
ONE SINGLE MESSAGE
NICE AS A HOBBY
HEART OF GRAPHIC DESIGN
HOME ON THE CITYWHAT I LOVE TO DO
TRASCEND A LIFE
UNIFYOPPORTUNITY TO WORK IN A LARGE SURFACE
A WAY OF LIFECLOSURE DESIGN
MY FAVOURITE MEDIAEXPRESS MY BELIEFS
www.posterposter.org
T H A N K Y O U