We had the pleasure of celebrating the publication of our book Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing with a lecture and book signing at California College of the Arts where we teach. It was a treat to see so many current and former students! Our friend and colleague Bob Aufuldish provided introductions, and Mac Warrick from ARCH Art & Drafting Supply was there to sell copies of the book—which we slowly signed. (Thank you Bob and Mac!)
Watch the lecture:
Symbols: Angie Wang + Mark Fox at CCA (24:50)
The beauty of this book is showing that symbolic language is not concise and univocal, but fluid, and contradictory, and richly endowed with narratives both past and present. —Steven Heller
Our book comprises symbols that are emblematic of different cultures, epochs, and motivations: images and artifacts created to evangelize, control, sell, teach, protest, initiate, or entertain. The range of media encompasses both the sacred and profane: oil paintings and biscuit packaging, national monuments and commercial trademarks. The work of Juan Gris and Maya Lin is treated with the same reverence as a mass-produced ashtray.
Preview or purchase Symbols. Also available at all better independent bookstores, including Kinokuniya in San Francisco, McNally Jackson in New York City, Hennessy + Ingalls in Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Store.
Prior to the election, we assumed that our Trump 24K Gold-Plated posters would be understood by now as a bullet the country collectively dodged. Unfortunately, we were wrong, and our work took on new meanings with Hillary Clinton’s loss on November 8.
We sent Trump 24K Gold-Plated to a number of curators around the world before the election, and are proud to announce that the poster has been acquired by the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich in Switzerland; the Poster Museum at Wilanów in Warsaw, Poland; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England.
The poster has also been acquired by the Letterform Archive in San Francisco and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) in Los Angeles.
Read our original statement about the design of the poster—written before the election—here.
See our Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster and others under Design is Play Studio Posters.
“Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing”
by Mark Fox and Angie Wang
The Monacelli Press, 2016
Our unauthorized campaign poster for Donald Trump is featured in “Who’s Behind that Anti-Trump Art?” on Co.Design by John Brownlee!
We are pleased to announce that The Monacelli Press is releasing our book Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing on November 8, 2016. This richly illustrated anthology includes more than 400 examples of ancient and contemporary art and design in a range of media, including architecture, film, industrial design, graphic design, illustration, and photography. Symbols documents and celebrates the many ways in which designers and artists have chosen to express symbolic ideas visually.
As graphic designers and instructors at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, we bring an informed, curatorial eye to the book’s content. British artist and craftsman William Morris implored the public to “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” If the book is understood as a kind of house, then we furnished Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing with useful and beautiful ideas and images.
Preview or pre-order from:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Also available from:
Kinokuniya in San Francisco
McNally Jackson in New York City
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Store
Inspired by Jesse Reed and Michael Bierut’s design of an official H monogram for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, we created an unauthorized campaign poster for Donald J. Trump. Whereas Hillary’s H pulls one’s eye to the letterform itself, the narrative implicit in our design requires the viewer’s gaze to oscillate between foreground and background; between typographic form and counter-form.
The form comprises four gold, rotating letter Ts which are emblematic of qualities projected by Donald Trump and largely accepted by his supporters: strength, success, wealth, and revolutionary (i.e. impolitic) speech. The counter-form suggests a conflicting narrative, however: namely, that Donald Trump’s disruptive and divisive rhetoric is creating metaphoric negative spaces in the fabric of American society. These spaces—fracture lines, really—snake through the design’s square silhouette to reveal a swastika. And while the swastika is historically a symbol of dynamism and cyclical renewal associated with the sun, in this context it simply evokes hate speech and nationalist demagoguery.
Let’s be clear: for some Americans, the attractive aspects of Donald Trump’s public persona can obscure his repellent views. The tension in our design between positive and negative space—between luxe gold foil letters and the matte black swastika—is meant to mirror this dualism, and it is a tension that makes some uncomfortable. “How do I know it’s anti-Trump?” one wary hipster asked when we offered him our poster in the Chrome store on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District.
We hung some of our posters along several blocks of the Mission District that Saturday afternoon. Did anyone notice? In his 1966 book I manifesti, Italian designer Attilio Rossi records that “The poster is an optic scandal. You don’t want to look at it yet you see it.” We know that our scandalous Trump posters were indeed seen; only hours later, even the tape that held them in place was gone.
See our Trump 14K Gold-Plated and Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster and others under Design is Play Studio Posters.
Touchstone Climbing owns and operates the most prestigious indoor climbing and bouldering gyms in California—and we are fortunate to have been working with them since 2010. The T monogram we designed is inspired by megalithic monuments such as the dolmens of Brittany or the taulas found on the Mediterranean island of Minorca: massive, stacked stones marking a place of importance in an often flat landscape.
The theme of the 1989 AIGA Design Conference held in San Antonio, Texas, was “Dangerous Ideas.” As a mere conference attendee, Seven Woes was my attempt to share some dangerous design ideas with my fellow attendees. Cheaply xeroxed, I handed out the postcard-sized list randomly while awaiting the first speaker one morning.
The Seven Woes are:
1
The designer who said: “I don’t need problems from some illustrator.”
2
The client who said: “I love what you’ve done, but did you have any other ideas?”
3
The art director who said: “Move to New York and I’ll use you.”
4
The designer who said: “This is far too sophisticated. Remember, your audience bowls.”
5
The client who said: “This won’t work at all; there aren’t any clichés.”
6
The designer who said: “We’re not creating art here—this is a business.”
7
The client who said: “I’m sorry, but we can’t use it; one of the women on the board thinks it looks like a penis.”
All of the quotes on the card are real, and were directed to me. (The art director in quote no. 3 is none other than Steven Heller.) The variation of the BlackDog logo was drawn by Gary Baseman. (MF)
Our latest assignment from Touchstone Climbing was to redesign the identity for Berkeley Ironworks, the East Bay indoor climbing gym that opened in 2000. The gear is a reference to ironworks, of course—the gym’s original logo featured three gears—and the yin and yang design alludes to Berkeley’s reputation for alternative or non-conformist thinking.
The symbol was carefully inked to determine the relationships between the positive and negative forms; line weights were optically adjusted to ensure that the individual elements contributed to a balanced and harmonious whole.
We designed a distinctive T monogram within an eight-pointed star to identify the new Sacramento microbrewery Touchstone Brewing Co. The construction of the monogram is based on a series of nested squares: one for the T, and two for the eight-pointed star (with one square rotated 45°). The mildly explosive process of fermentation is suggested by the outwardly expanding star and the surrounding pattern of beer bubbles.
We look forward to sampling the product when the brewery launches. Cheers!
Three of a series of five letterpress coasters illustrated by our good friend Greg Clarke. Designed for our referral marketing client Extole, the coaster illustrations express the idea of “sharing.” Cheers!
Printed by The Ligature in Berkeley, California.
Sacramento Pipeworks is a Northern California indoor rock climbing gym, with 40-foot walls and 11,000 square feet of climbing terrain. Originally opened by Touchstone Climbing in 2001, we were hired to redesign the gym identity.
Housed in a former pipeworks, the trademark is decidedly industrial, with a “machine shop” skull and crossbones. Our custom typography is a nod to the idea of pipes and the bending of pipes, and was inspired by a typeface lettered by German designer Max Körner in the late 1940’s.
Located next door to Pipeworks will be Pintworks, a taproom serving craft beers brewed by Touchstone Brewing Co. The Pintworks identity is a riff on Pipeworks, with a drop of beer replacing the nut over crossed wrenches.
Our client Extole is a referral marketing company specializing in new customer acquisition for its clients. They recently moved their San Francisco office and asked us to propose a treatment for their lobby.
The men’s club vibe of their building on Sansome Street downtown is apparent in the marble and chandelier—which we decided to play against. We worked with Los Angeles illustrator Greg Clarke to create a series of Greco-Roman busts that are equal parts classical, modern (note the iPhone), and ridiculous (animal heads). Greg’s approach harmonizes with the formality of the architectural space while simultaneously creating a humorous (and therefore human) contrast.
Environmental photography by John Sutton.
In addition to the work from Design is Play mentioned in our last plog, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired seven of Mark’s agitprop screen printed posters designed when he worked under the name BlackDog.
Works include “Elvis Ain’t King” (1992), about the Los Angeles Police Department Beating of Rodney King (above); “The Great Seal (after El Lissitsky)” (1998); “Cover Your Head” (1992); “howiloveya” (1998); “Tricky Ollie” (1998); “State of the Union (Where Friends Meet Friends)” (1998); and “End Pollution: Bomb the Pentagon” (1991). You can read about “End Pollution: Bomb the Pentagon” on our February 21, 2011 plog post.
See other agitprop posters at BlackDog.
Three posters and one postcard we designed in 2010 and 2011 were acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of their Decorative Arts and Design collection.
“Getting Upper” (left) is a screen printed poster we designed for an exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. Read about it on our March 14, 2011 plog post.
The “Craft Forward” (right) poster announces a symposium on craft at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and features a pattern based on the symposium identity we designed. Read about the identity on our January 5, 2011 plog post.
See other posters under Design is Play Studio Posters.
The wordmark we designed for Farmhouse Modern is based on the hot-metal typeface Hispalis Bold Titling. We don’t know who designed Hispalis or when it was originally released, but we assume it dates from the first half of the 20th century. Hispalis was issued by the Spanish foundry Nacional.
After inking several of the letters—the easier ones!—and rendering the forms in Adobe Illustrator, we worked with Rod Cavazos and his team at Psy/Ops to build out the final wordmark. Rod’s typographic expertise was much appreciated!
We think our revival of Hispalis embodies the dualities embodied by Farmhouse Modern: old vs. new, rural vs. urban, nature vs. design and, in some sense, female vs. male.
Farmhouse Modern is a website and quarterly magazine that celebrates a simple but refined aesthetic for the home. We developed both a wordmark and monogram—the latter specifically so that Farmhouse Modern can discreetly brand a range of custom products sold on its website.
The FM monogram we created is designed for maximum usability. Comprising only four disconnected lines, the mark is easily stenciled or sandblasted, as well as molded, embossed, embroidered, or printed. It also works well on-screen, and is legible at a size of less than 1/8″ in print.
Hollywood Boulders is our latest collaboration with Touchstone Climbing in San Francisco. Slated to open later this year, Hollywood Boulders will be Southern California’s largest indoor bouldering gym, with 18-foot walls and 11,000 square feet of climbing terrain.
The geometry of the tri-skull symbol suggests both an urban skyline as well as the dihedral features of a rock wall. It’s also a nod to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery which just happens to be across the street from the gym.
Cliffs of Id is a new climbing gym from Touchstone Climbing opening in Culver City, California. It is named after a passage in Reyner Banham’s Four Ecologies of Los Angeles, a book about Southern California and its architecture: “The Plains of Id are where the crudest urban lusts and most fundamental aspirations are created, manipulated and, with luck, satisfied.”
The Cliffs of Id symbol is a winged robot, an encapsulation of the mythic future as promised to America by the movie and television industries of Southern California in the 1950’s and 60’s. Like most of our trademark work, we inked this symbol by hand prior to rebuilding it in Illustrator. The wordmark is set in a 17 Oblong, an architectural typeface by Dutch designers René Knip and Janno Hahn at Arktype.
