little epiphanies

I have a feeling this chart will come very much in handy as a reference.  “We’ve gotta eat these right now, before they turn into sevens.”  

Poster design for Chicago band Midnight Moxie by Grace Amandes Gaceta.  Photo by Kevin Viol.

Love.

(Source: cedarnouns, via fyeahgraphicdesign)

We’ve all been wondering how this gets done.

(Source: blog.thaeger.com, via fyeahgraphicdesign)

Picture this: 

You’re eating lunch at a big table with a group of people you barely know.  Most of you decided to try the pasta for the first time.  It’s pretty good.  As the meal winds down, your conversation moves from complaining about the class you had to wake up so early for towards a riskier topic: music.  You are pleasantly surprised when you all agree that that one band that you just got into a few months ago is the greatest band of all time.  You clear your plates and trays, and wander out of the dining hall.

It’s your freshman year of college, and you’ve spent the last few weeks meeting dozens of new people every day.  Based on living circumstances and the initial screening phase, you’ve acquired a group of ‘friends’ that you have been spending more time with than you ever did with your closest friends from home.  And yet you hardly know a thing about them, and you are desperate for them to know more about you.

And this is what makes the poster sale so exciting. 

Wandering out of the dining hall, you and your new friends join a mass of students flipping through huge plastic books of images depicting Marilyn Monroe with dumbbells, Al Pacino with a machine gun, and women in bikinis from the neck down. You casually browse through these, sincerely hoping you might find a poster that epitomizes everything that you are … without taking itself too seriously.  You could take the easy route and go with irony, choosing the same poster as the beastly football player next to you.  Or you could spend the rest of your lunch hour searching for a poster you actually like.  Whatever you choose, this poster won’t be with you long.  It will fall from your cinder block wall dozens of times, the sticky tack you used to temporarily secure it collecting lint and hair from the rug that you will never ever vacuum.  By the time you graduate, your poster will be in tatters and you will be so sick of it that you don’t even care. 

If only you’d had Moxy Creative House.

If this site had existed when I was in college, I would have had the best Bob Dylan poster on campus.  Instead of Andy Warhol’s Marilyns, I would’ve had a print of his glasses.  I could even have found an Anchorman poster that I liked. Their concept is perfect.  Take a movie/celebrity/sport that people love and design a poster that is artful and actually worthy of a frame.  

I came upon the Moxy Creative site when it was featured on the design blog We and the Color.  They had posted an image of what looked like a bunch of paper doll outfits.  Up close, these outfits turned out to be the illustrations of signature costumes worn by celebrity rockers that make up the Ensemble poster series.

Their other series include Cheers! (beer bottles representing teams in the 2010 World Cup), Framework (celebrity eyewear), Mixed Reviews (movie titles turned into mixed drinks), and Dress the Part (“10 movie posters inspired by men’s style”).

So what’s next for Moxy Creative House?  Well, let’s hope for some female-inspired wall art.  Lady rockers wear amazing clothing, too.  They could even start with my own band, Midnight Moxie, since we share their name and we dress in themed costumes each time we perform.  Just thinking out loud.  I’ll bet there are some college students who would want us on their walls.