Miscellaneous
Posters for public consumption
1993 Starbucks by Starlight
Euro-leaning poster for series of open-air jazz concerts, sponsored in part by the coffee retailers. In the early nineties, there were only two or three Starbucks in Portland, and the dominant store overlooked Pioneer Courthouse Square. Michael Jones made the photograph, and Martin Curtis figured out how to print the vivid reds and blues without using touchplates. I'm not sure I would use the Monotype Grotesque 216 if I had it to do all over again, but I was looking at a lot of Mike Dempsey's work at the time.
1993 Festival of Flowers
Poster for annual horticultural exhibition held in downtown Portland. Like the program circulars for the Northwest Film Center, this was one of those projects that made the rounds of Portland’s design offices. Historically, the resulting posters had been delicate and, er, flowery. We took an aggressive tack, pairing strong typographic forms with Rafael Astorga’s dynamic, quasi-erotic images, reasoning that it was the citizenry that made the event a festival. Portland advertising agent Jerry Ketel acted as creative director here, when he was still a freelancer.
1994 Starbucks by Starlight
For the second Starbucks by Starlight poster, as we have mentioned elsewhere, we got in touch with our inner Reid Miles, although here we went went to the well only for typographic reference: definitely an hommage, not a swipe. This poster was big by American standards, filling an entire 40-inch press sheet. Design problem: that's too big for shop owners to post it in their windows, and this ain't Switzerland, so there are no public kiosks. Astorga made the photographs; Dynagraphics did the printing.
Headline
Poster for a double bill of live theatre written and/or directed by our old friend, playwright Nick Zagone. The evening explored various types of human isolation; a theme underscored by the idiosyncratic typography and strong verticality of the poster, which was designed to post on telephone poles, sharing ground with band posters, in kiosk-free Portland. Students of proportion may be interested to know that all of this poster’s proportions – type sizes, line length, white space, external shape, everything – were derived using Le Corbusier’s modulor.
