Design is Play

Play Press: TDC Typography 38, Judges Choice

We are proud to have our Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster designated a “Judge’s Choice” by juror Spencer Charles. Below are his comments from Typography 38, the Annual of the Type Directors Club:

“The judging for this competition took place the weekend after the U.S. presidential inauguration, the same weekend the nation was dealing with the fallout from the immigration ban that had just been enacted. Because of this context, and because of the thoughtful execution of this poster, it provoked a conversation unlike any other entry in the competition. Additionally, it demonstrated that typography can (and should) extend beyond formal and aesthetic considerations and can very powerfully communicate the spirit of its content, even if that purpose is to agitate and make a political statement.”

See our Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster and others under Design is Play Studio Posters.

Play Press: The Design of Dissent

(clockwise from top left) Trump 24K Gold-Plated, Republican Contract on America, howiloveya and Beware of God.

Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilić’s “Expanded Edition” of The Design of Dissent includes posters from Design is Play, BlackDog, and California College of the Arts!

We are honored that our 2016 poster Trump 24K Gold-Plated shares a spread with work from Barbara Kruger and Edel Rodriguez. Earlier BlackDog posters are also represented, including Republican Contract on America (1995), howiloveya (1998), and Beware of God (1992).

Student work from my CCA Graphic Design 1 classes includes posters by Dan Covert and Wishmini Perera. [MF]

See our Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster and others under Design is Play Studio Posters.

Trump (Moloch) and the San Francisco March for Science

We are publishing a new poster—Trump (Moloch)—to protest the anti-scientific, anti-environmental policies of Donald Trump and the Republican party. We will be attending the San Francisco “March for Science” on April 22 with our posters held high.

The poster design is a variation of one I originally created for an international environmental poster exhibit in 1997. (See lower image.) The exhibit coincided with the Third Session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Kyoto, Japan. (This session produced the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that committed signatories to reduce greenhouse gasses in an effort to slow the effects of climate change. Although the United States signed the Protocol under President Clinton, the Senate failed to ratify the treaty.)

The 1997 version of my poster is titled Capitalism Consuming His Children (Moloch). The image is inspired by Francisco Goya’s 1819–23 painting Saturn Devouring His Children, and depicts a disembodied, satanic head—Capitalism—gleefully eating a human while smoke billows from its stack. Moloch is the name of an ancient Canaanite god who was worshiped through human sacrifice—specifically, the immolation of children.

Less than 100 days in office, Donald Trump appears hell-bent on becoming the most pro-pollution, anti-environmental American president in half a century. From leasing federal lands to the coal industry, to dismantling clean water rules, to reducing fuel efficiency in cars and trucks, the Republicans will make America more toxic and all of our lives shorter, nastier, and more brutish. Twenty years after the Kyoto Protocol, Trump’s regressive war on the planet has made this new version of my old poster feel sadly appropriate.

Screen printed in gloss black on two fluorescent papers by John Sullivan at Logos Graphics in San Francisco. [MF]

Play at Frog, 2.28.2017

At the invitation of our former student Constance Smith, we had the honor of speaking about our studio practice and the writing of our new book Symbols at Frog Design in San Francisco. Our friends from ARCH were again on hand to sell copies of Symbols, and we followed the lecture with a book signing.

Founded in 1969 in Germany, Frog is a global design consultancy with offices in New York, Munich, Milan, Amsterdam, London, Shanghai, and Sydney.

Play Press: Trump 24K Gold-Plated Acquired by Two European Museums

We are thrilled that our anti-Trump poster was acquired by both the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in February. These are the fourth and fifth European museums to add Trump 24K Gold-Plated to their design collections.

Still no word from any of the American curators we sent the poster to…

See Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster and others under Design is Play Studio Posters.

Play Press: Typography 38

Both Trump 14K Gold-Plated and Trump 24K Gold-Plated were selected for inclusion in the 2017 Annual of the Type Directors Club, Typography 38. (It was designated a “Judge’s Choice” by juror Spencer Charles.) In addition to being exhibited in New York City, our posters and the other winning entries will tour cities in the United States, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

See other posters under Design is Play Studio Posters.

Play Press: Communication Arts 2017 Typography Annual

Thank you Communication Arts and the judges of the 7th Typography Annual for including our unauthorized Trump campaign poster for publication!

We created two versions of the Trump campaign poster, foil stamping the design in two different shades of gold. Both posters were then register embossed. Trump 24K Gold-Plated is one of 143 projects out of 1,839 entries that will appear in the January/February issue of Communication Arts.

See our Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster and others under Design is Play Studio Posters.

Symbols: A Lecture and Book Party at CCA, 11.21.2016

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)

Play Press: Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing Now in Print

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.

Play Press: Trump 24K Gold-Plated Acquired by Three European Museums

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.

Play Press: Our New Book!

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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

Trump 24K Gold-Plated

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 Identity

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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.

Berkeley Ironworks Identity

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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.

Touchstone Brewing Co. Identity

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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!