THE POSTER BOYS

In catching up on blog updates, I realized I hadn't yet announced the start of my new design podcast with my colleague Brandon Schaefer, The Poster Boys. We're four episodes into a series of long and casual conversations about important poster artists, designers, and movements in graphic design history.  The hub for The Poster Boys is our Tumblr page, theposterboys.tumblr.com, where we attempt to solve the problem of making a visual topic aurally stimulating by showing you the images and posters we're talking about, all in one tidy and chronological spot. Check it out and follow us.

Posters by Brandon Schaefer 

As Brandon and I both design movie posters, our conversations naturally veer into this area as we discuss the challenges and rewards of working in that particular industry. Brandon and I met designing movie posters online for fun and have remained friends since as we both moved into the world of professional design. You can see his great work at seekandspeak.com.

Our first topic was an obvious choice: Saul Bass, legendary designer of movie posters, title sequences, and short films. Such a towering figure of design that we had to take two full episodes to stretch out the conversation (hear Part One here, and Part Two here). We discuss his work with logos and corporate branding, his film icons and posters, his industrial films, his artistic collaborators, and his philosophy about what makes good design.

Episode Three looked at a different kind of movie poster legend: painter Drew Struzan. Anyone of my generation knows Struzan's work from a variety of 80's and 90's adventure posters that adorned the theater halls of their childhood, including his iconic work on the Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars films (we saved Star Wars for a special "galaxy far far away" episode coming later this year).

In Episode Four, we switched gears to less of a household name, but one that we hope will be known by all budding designers: Bob Gill. Gill outlines a concise, refreshing, and potentially game-changing philosophy of design problem solving in his various books and talks, and we celebrate his rules and vocabulary in this episode. Each episode we also open up "The Flat File" to look at the posters for a particular film that were produced by different designers and artists around the world for various purposes, and here we have a particularly interesting and sobering example of the artist's eternal struggle with the marketing machine.

Which brings us to Episode Five, coming later this month, on the Polish Poster School. It's a mammoth topic, and I'm sure we'll only just scratch the surface of this influential movement in design, where Polish artists and designers of the 40's and 50's worked through the post-war social realist era and gave birth to an entirely new and daring language of film poster design. I'll be sure to post again when this episode is up, and you can click around on my blog here (or use the Categories section on the right) to find a whole slew of Polish poster posts.

To keep up with what we're doing, subscribe here on iTunes, and if you can, leave a rating and/or review to help us reach a wider audience. And keep your browser aimed at theposterboys.tumblr.com where you can listen to episodes and view all relevant and related visual materials for the episodes. We're also on Twitter at @PosterBoysShow and on Facebook as well. Have a listen, stay in touch, and let us know what you think.

BRESSON'S BYAKUYA

Here is an illustration I was commissioned to create for the Japanese 35mm release of Robert Bresson's FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER ("BYAKUYA" in Japanese). My first piece of art made specifically for a Japanese audience, I couldn't be more proud to be involved with this restoration of Bresson's most rarely seen (and uncharacteristically romantic) feature, coming to Eurospace theatres just after the esteemed retrospective of Bresson's films made its way around the US. This illustration, as well as the drawings below featuring some memorable images from the film, will be featured in the program book for this release. Learn more at Byakuya2012.

TOP 10 POSTERS / ELENA PROCESS

I almost forgot! Adrian Curry, my awesome art director on the ELENA poster, also happens to curate the great Movie Poster of the Week column at MUBI, and he recently shared some of my process sketches from ELENA and as a bonus asked me to select my ten favorite movie posters. A really fun list to put together. You can read it here.

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

Amelie, Japanese poster, 20 x 29 inches. A reproduction of this is currently on my wall. I love the negative space, the script and the scene.

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

L'Avventura, 1960, Japanese, 20 x 29", designer unknown

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

1. The internet is boring on the weekends. 2. There are thousands of amazing posters. I've combined these two truths to bring you the Saturday Evening Poster. Look for it each week. Usually they will be film posters from different countries, but I'm making an exception already this week because this poster features a giant robot, an underwater city, choo-choo train and a space station. Courtesy of the collection of Sandi Vincent, this poster by Susumu Eguchi was made for a children's science exhibition at a Tobu department store. Source: Graphis Annual 69/70.

DESIGN BOOKSHELF: AGI

Happy Friday... These images come from the book Posters by Members of the Alliance Graphique Internationale 1960-1985, edited by Rudolph de Harak and published in '86. The AGI, of which countless international design legends were members, is still active and even has its own Flickr stream. You can head over to MY Flickr for some additional images (and these are only a fraction of this book) and credits for the designers.

TADANORI YOKOO

I recently discovered the art of Tadanori Yokoo, only to learn that he's considered one of, if not the most influential Japanese graphic designers of the 20th century. While his popularity in the 60's led to a lot of work providing psychedelic artwork for bands (including The Beatles), his primary medium seems to have been the poster, where his design and style just blows my mind. Each poster has its own complex layout and architecture, from his beautiful borders to the layered collages of images within the frame, ranging in scale from the miniature to the massive. Bright bold colors, but always within a decisive palette. A perfect integration of hand-drawn images and lettering and photographic images. Playfulness and beauty. I plan on stealing as much as humanly possible from this guy in the future.

There doesn't seem to be an affordable way to hang any Tadanori Yokoo posters on my wall, but I've ordered this book on Amazon to study these designs and a prolific amount of others in greater depth. Thorough scavenging in bookstores around the world sometimes leads to a discovery of a cheap book of Yokoo posters, or, if you're lucky, a copy of "Waterfall Rapture: Postcards of Falling Water:" a photographic book devoted to Yokoo's personal collection of waterfall postcards. It might be my favorite book I own, and it deserves its own blog post.

I love everything Japanese, especially visual art and design, but Tadanori Yokoo just about takes the cake. And to make him even more of a badass in my mind, I just learned that he starred in Nagisa Oshima's film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. Check out this blog post at 50 Watts (one of my very favorite art/design blogs on the internet) to learn a little more about Yokoo and see some additional images. Be sure to click on them and enlarge to appreciate the detail.

DESIGN BOOKSHELF: 12 Japanese Masters

I just scored this 2002 book by Graphis titled 12 Japanese Masters, featuring some great work by many designers I didn't know much about. I bought this book looking to get some larger views of Tadanori Yokoo's poster art (I'll be posting more about this badass soon), but I was rewarded with lots of other great stuff as well. Right now I'm stuck on the above image by Kazumasa Nagai entitled "Save Me. please. I'm here." Head over to my Flickr page to see some more pictures. I'll be posting pictures and scans from my bookshelf from time to time, and hopefully the quality of my photos will improve with that... Until then, I hope they inspire you in some way.