Design is Play

Recent Posts

Play Press: “We the People” poster exhibition, The Cooper Union, NYC

We are one of ten U.S. design studios invited to interpret an amendment from the Bill of Rights. We were randomly assigned the Sixth Amendment—the right to a fair trial.

Organized by ThoughtMatter, Mirko Ilić, and The Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource), the exhibit is open to the public September 18-23 at The Cooper Union, NYC.

See our poster and others under Design is Play Studio Posters.

Handwriting: Mathieu Lommen
Photography: Mark Serr
Sculpture: One of two cast-concrete “Urns of Justice” at the U.S. Courthouse in Lafayette, Louisiana, by artist Diana Moore.
(Source image from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

 

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]