Design is Play

Recent Posts

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!

designisplay_26_sep_2016

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.