Sunday 18 August 2019

With Mike's posters it's standard not to use Helvetica


















Mike Joyce hit on a unique way of presenting the flamboyant, vibrant yet stunningly amateurish punk music posters from the seventies to the nineties by turning to the complete opposite, the very controlled minimalist posters of Swiss designers from the fifties and sixties. In particular Josef Muller-Brockmann's work for the Zurich concert hall 'musica viva' series of musical events was a heavy inspiration. These posters were always in lower case and only used Berthold's Anzidenz Grotesk (or Standard Medium to the rest of the world). More inspiration came from the graphic design excellence of Armin Hofmann, Karl Gerstner, Richard Paul Lohse and others.

Joyce sticks to his theme and refuses to deviate from all lower case and the sans type face which is fine though I thought several of these posters seemed to playing about with colored shapes and huge or angled type but this throws up many that are really wonderful to look at. There are just under two hundred in the book which is impressively large (fourteen inches deep) and nicely all the pages have a perforation so you can easily remove your favorites to display on a wall.
            


































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