 Well it is so exciting to see so many people come out to see how posters work and make posters in our workshop. It was really fun this afternoon to see all that making and doing. I'm Ellen Lupton. I'm senior curator of contemporary design here at Cooper Hewitt Museum and I organized how posters work with Caitlin Condall and Gil S. Davidson who are both here in the audience. I'm very happy to see them and we had a great event today with Globe poster from Micah. Yes that's really cool and Katie Evans who's an art director at Ivanka Trump and also a Micah alum running our color bar and Renee Putt and Rihanna Petter who are from the Netherlands and who are going to present tonight their design research on how posters work of their own sort in Amsterdam. So we're really excited about that. Special thanks to the Adobe Foundation and the Dutch Consulate for making our exhibition possible and especially today's program where we were able to bring designers from the Netherlands here to to work and make and do and talk about what they do. What we're going to do is I'm going to talk briefly about the exhibition that just opened yesterday. There's upstairs on the first and second floor here at Cooper Hewitt and I'm going to talk a little bit about the curatorial idea. This is called a curators talk and show you a few of my favorite stories and things from the exhibition. I'm then going to turn it over to Renee and Rihanna who will talk about their project and I'll introduce that a little bit and then we'll have a short conversation and hear from all of you and we're going to keep it on time. We're going to get you out of here by 615 so you can go to an industry city in Brooklyn and see all the amazing design stuff going on there tonight as well. But I'm really glad that you're here to talk about posters and graphic design. So I've been doing exhibitions about graphic design for many, many years longer than many on this planet and it's an interesting challenge because graphic design is not really intended to be exhibited. It's intended to be used. It's intended to be encountered in everyday life and in fact we often don't notice it and don't think about it being there. We simply come upon it and make use of it. So graphic design exhibitions are kind of innately weird because what we do as curators is take the stuff out of its natural habitat and create environments like this one. This is our show graphic design now in production on Governor's Island in 2012 and it's a beautiful installation but it's not how we encounter graphic design in everyday life. And so graphic designers themselves often complain about this and it's one of my historic ironies as a curator that it's the graphic designers that always complain the most when you make a graphic design exhibition and the way they complain is they say it's problematic in a very intellectual way of saying like I have an issue here because you've taken graphic design out of context, right? You've put it on a wall, you put it in a case and we can't touch it and we're looking at it in this kind of unnatural way. Bryn Smith is a wonderful young design critic and she did a whole project where she studied all the complaints about graphic design exhibitions where people have talked about it's like putting a bird and a cage and it's like putting a young person in prison and it's this terrible violence that we do to graphic design, taking it out of everyday life. And I look at that conversation and it kind of annoys me because in my opinion that's the whole point is that as a curator we take these things out of the street, out of the store, out of the airport and put them in a beautiful place like Cooper Hewitt Museum so that people will see it and pay attention and in essence that's what a museum is. A museum is a machine or an apparatus that allows us to pay attention to art, to history, to ideas and yes to graphic design. And so as designers we often are encountering the products of our discipline isolated from use, right, so we're on the web all the time and looking at blogs and looking at designer's own website. This is the identity for the new Whitney Museum designed by experimental Jet Set who has a whole group of posters on view in our exhibition upstairs and this is how their work looks on their website, it's very beautiful and elegant and it's isolated from use and here it is on 23rd Street. I kind of like it both ways, I like encountering graphic design in real life but I also like having a chance to focus on the discourse of design. This is a bookstore, this is how books look in a bookstore, it's one of the places that we encounter graphic design. These are two editions of the same book, one created for my mom and the other one for a sexy housewife in Brooklyn and it's the same book but but graphic design is used to create a different focus and a different audience and message for the same content but we also encounter book covers in places like this right like the Apple bookstore on your phone and so graphic design has to live in these different environments at different scales both real and unreal right real and represented. Graphic designers have an obsession with we hate it when type gets squished you know in Photoshop or Illustrator we feel that that's a great violence against letter forms I know there's some very important font designers here who would agree with me but when I look at this I'm like well here's an instance because of the context of use that actually this type looks really awesome right because it is such an emotional statement and it's in this compressed space of a bumper sticker like the context justifies the means right and the fuller context of this is not only is this an amazing bumper sticker but when I saw it on the streets of Baltimore it was on the back of a driver's ed car and it's that full life that we have to celebrate when we think of design living out there in the world and all its in glorious self but I like to say here we are in a museum and a museum is also a context for graphic design and so when we were our team here talking about let's do a poster show Cooper Hewitt has over 3,000 posters in our collection many of them have never been exhibited we haven't done an exhibition exclusively about posters I think since the 80s and Gail Davidson could confirm that later but it's been a long time that we have devoted an exhibition just to posters and the concept of this show is to not do it an exhibition that's really about posters at all it's really about visual language and visual communication and what we did is we identified 14 design principles and we went through the collection both digitally and going through the drawers in our amazing state-of-the-art storage facility in Newark looking for ideas looking for ways that designers do things with form and then to use the poster as the kind of laboratory of graphic design right posters are where designers have for 150 years explored the medium they have pushed the language of image and type and communication and also just used it in the most base ways to sell things and to argue for a political point of view and so that's what we did is we we took it out of context and put the posters in the museum in order to look at how design works how two-dimensional design works and so here you can see some of that so the whole show is organized as this kind of visual dictionary of these simple design strategies and we produced a beautiful book with the exhibition that has almost three times as many posters in the book so to me that the book is like the the ultimate exhibition because that will last forever right in a few months these posters will all go back in their drawer but that book will make these particular pieces that we pulled out of our our available and documented and on view indefinitely through that medium so that's that's super exciting so what I'm gonna do just for a few minutes is show you some of the principles in the exhibition and it's really important to me that active they're all things that that you can do as a designer or just as someone at design and they're not rules so some of them contradict each other they're more their phenomena their their tools their techniques that designers use so the first one is called focus the eye and is what one of the first things I think we all learn and in design school right is that you have to show people where to look you can't just have a whole bunch of stuff all scattered around or people don't know where to look and graphic designers instinctively do this and they train themselves to do this so these are two two posters from the you know mid 20th century from our collection they're both war propaganda posters one for World War two the other for the Spanish Civil War in both cases they they feature this you know very realistically rendered object or scene and everything the designer has done around that like focuses our attention on that single object right the lighting the stuff going on on the ground but what I think is really cool also is that both of these posters have a diagonal element right they're not sitting straight up and down so I took this poster and I I made it straight like just to see how they like I could do this all day right like this is what we do right and so the poster has this thing stuck in the middle but it's not static right and by by putting the object on an angle and the other one does that too right the this sort of angular thing on the on the dinner tables creating this dynamic point of view and and we were really interested in design theory and the kind of history of looking at at posters Bruno Minari the great Italian designer wrote an essay in 1966 making fun of posters that just have a big circle in the middle and he thought that was like the dumbest thing ever and this very lazy thing that designers do which is this big round thing so of course I had great fun finding all the examples in our collection that just have a big circle in the middle because it is a it always works right so next time you're stuck put a big circle in the middle it really works and one of my favorites is this poster by Gottlieb Solon who is a Swiss modern man the 50s and 60s and we think that this poster is actually referred to in Bruno Minari critique big phonograph in the middle and designers continue to to use this strategy because it's universal it's really functional but sometimes they do it kind of in reverse or find a way to problematize there's that word problem again to make it problematic to put a big so this is by Felix fofley who we believe is the youngest designer represented in our exhibition amazing young Swiss designer this is his poster for future islands more Baltimore okay we have a big Baltimore group here so his poster for future islands has a big circle in the middle but it's an empty circle it's a void right so it's not a center of gravity it's this kind of light right shining out of the center and dissolving everything around it it's this kind of emptiness right and so I love how he takes a cliche of design and really different from it something new in the same gallery upstairs we have this category overwhelm the eye with opposite right of focusing we'll put you in mind of course of psychologists which tried to confuse you right using colors and you know type that all runs together with like negative kerning and in order to to create an optical experience that is the opposite of focus right that challenges you to write a kind of graphic design analog of being high and other designers today continue to experiment with this and to create posters that are not about focus but are about this kind of optical assault and we think that is super interesting and that's kind of experimental edge of graphic design this creation of new languages right another area I really like is the idea of storytelling we have a lot of posters that are very narrative and quality one of my as a curator really in my whole career was an afternoon spent with Caitlyn and and Gail in our storage facility looking at drawer after drawer of posters and we came to this one is one of the first posters to be collected by Cooper Hewitt it's a World War two poster and this was a common theme a lot of a lot of posters were made that that told this particular story and the story is that if people on the ground were mindlessly talking about information that they knew about troop movements or where a ship was going to go the enemy might be listening and the enemy could then sink the ship so a careless word a needless thinking right this is this is the propaganda message here they didn't even have Twitter then but you know people could still and so this this poster very literally tells the story see the burning ship we see the sailors in the foreground in their lifeboat right watching the ship burn we as viewers are in that boat with right that's our point of view right as a point of view and we're in the boat with those guys watching that ship go down so so we're at the curators are in Newark looking at this poster and we turn that poster over and under it is another poster that tells the same story but in a different way a better way you want to see it okay I'm gonna show you okay whoa okay just as someone talked right and so he got rid of the ship he got rid of four words eight people yeah it's just one guy about to drown and the point of view is now he's reaching out to us because it's our fault right we are implicated in this terrible scene so to me that's just like wow to be able to find those two things is truly stunning and then I later learned that that poster was directly inspired by these posters by Abram games who's the great modern British poster designer who is the official poster artist in the UK during World War two and his posters were also about getting rid of all the excess and creating a pure emotional connection and the US office of war information hired Frederick Siebel to copy Abram games so it's also graphic design nothing's ever new right you always copying something and then we have posters like this amazing film posters that are very narrative and take a kind of anti-hollywood stance including a lot of Polish posters like the one on the right which is for Rosemary's baby and the artist has created his own very weird and creepy representation of the movie which for anyone that remembers this movie which is just ingrained in my psyche this scene never happens in Rosemary's baby we never see Mia Farrow touch the devil child that she has birthed right we hear the baby cry at the end and the message at the end of the movie is that she is going to raise the kid right it is her baby she's gonna take care of it no matter what but they never really touch and we never see this happen kind of cool another another category is amplified and the idea that graphic designers are about turning up the volume right we have visual means that we use to make a message more urgent to make it louder we use all caps and giant type and alarming images screaming faces right to create visual noise right to turn up the volume so here's two wonderful posters and the designers of these posters are here in the audience tonight so I'm really pleased that they came out Terry Foreman this piece is featured in our in our book and she's using the all caps the exclamation point hand rendered italic type to show this kind of anger and rage and urgency of a message and Anton von Daalen here with also all caps using imagery and double entendre and the multiplicity of language they're really alarming and intense right that grabs you emotionally and his posters were designed to be either spray painted on a wall or he could use the same stencil to create a print on paper like you see here both of these posters are from a collection that was given to Cooper Hewitt in the early 90s by Steve Heller and Kerry Jacobs the angry graphics collection so we're really excited to be able to show quite a few of them and put even more in our wonderful book and then finally make eye contact we find out so many posters full emotionally through the eyes that we as human beings want to connect with people through the eye and these are two posters by by Paula share one which features is you know giant eyes that bleed off the screen but the other one that replaces the eyes with type and in a sense creates even more emotional impact by deleting that very thing that we want to connect with and putting the type there sure you know where to look right because we're always looking for that eye contact and that brings me to this which is the project poster number 524 by our Dutch guests Renee put and Rihanna Petter who are here from the Netherlands to be with us and they did a special installation in the exhibition which is really their research on how posters work and they're gonna tell you more about it but they they collected five three commercial advertising posters and cultural posters from the streets of Amsterdam real functional stuff not artsy shit you know but functional posters and they subjected these posters to all kinds of analysis visually including this where they found eyes as being the central focus of dozens of posters that that's the place where you're supposed to look this is from the cover of their book which is an amazing document where the they've taken all these experiments and research and that this book is available upstairs in our museum shop it's very rare you really can't find this book in the US except in the most specialized places so we're really excited that we're able to display that this original project in our exhibition and share it with you so this is from their research on on focal point which you can see upstairs in our opening gallery gallery 106 and I am going to now introduce them invite them to the stage to talk to you about this project which is a really original piece of design research love it okay thank you thank you for having us thank you for being here okay maybe we start wide away because we need our time our project started in fact at the Gerhard Riedfeld Academy I'm a teacher over there a professor and they have an institute called the Institute for research Institute for art and public space and that allows professors of the Riedfeld Academy to do an independent research project and I worked several times with Rihanna together on projects very successfully so I thought let's share together this invitations to do in a research project the the subject of our research project was we had to find a good project for our research so we thought what would be an interesting subject to study on to do research about and we were looking for research project was which was related to our field of graphic design so we came up with the idea of posters poster is related of course to our field of graphic design so for us it was really the thing we wanted to do research about and of course it's it's a part of the urban environments at a public place for us it was also really important that we have emotional contact with the poster too and yeah we think the form and function of a lot of posters are based or seem to based on dominant conventions and we consider it important to develop the poster so that was a good reason to research it I think and first we're going to show some impressions because Amsterdam is a way different than the streets in New York for example I see an impression of and a variety of poster in the city you see as well as commercial and cultural posters and you see here some illegal poster spread out and legally there's a huge variety and they are distributed almost every week you see a lot of presented in the city and so that's a rich culture visual culture visible in this poster design but then the question became a little bit for us also being part of this research group how can we do research how can we somehow set up a program for ourselves that you could start really doing some from some research with visual outcomes and we were thinking about maybe we should get us some material we needed something to research you can't research the poster in general that's impossible I think and it was also too abstract to research the posters in the streets so what we did we contacted three different distributors from posters in Amsterdam and we asked them to collect every poster they collected during three months so we get lots of posters of them in three months we collected 523 posters and there were four sizes so the big bus shelter posters a zero a one and a two what you see over here was this whole but already what Ellen was talking about it was hard for us to study them in their habitat so what we had to do was to bring them back from the streets to our studio so in that sense that became our laboratory to be able to study these posters and to analyze these posters based on the visual components they were designed with the whole stack of posters on the floor of my studio in Amsterdam we were also looking for a way to study these posters physically so now we had these posters into my studio we could really start cutting straight through the posters so we were looking for these methods of research that you got visual data and that was a way for us to get into the material so here so you see some pictures of the working process yeah we wanted to reveal the DNA of the poster so we started cutting out parts of the poster the building blocks of posters for example we show it later on and we we process the process was we made a lot of pictures with of it we used so as well as a digital as analog methods and sometimes it took us like days to to make a poster or a new a new work and these are all pictures from a working process so you get a little bit an impression of the studio you get a little bit an impression of the method of working intensity and then we started to that now we will show you some results of our research and we started with one of the most interesting or let's say one of the most urgent questions was what is the focal point of a poster what why are you looking at if you look at the poster what attracts the first at the first time your eye so from each poster we cut out the focal point the size of a circle of 10 centimeters diagram a diameter and these separate circles were pinned on the wall within an empty space we made on the wall and placing exactly their original position so what you see here is actually a kind of visual data visualization and these are 220 posters and 20 220 focal points and you see them we build it again here upstairs in the exhibition yeah when we were looking at the final result we also had a little bit of feeling hate it looks also somehow familiar so what you see the final result but how can we read this image how can we understand it or how can we look at it so what we did we took the colon section which we are all familiar with we put it on top of this result we had constructed on the wall of my studio and then we find out that everything was in that sense completely within this colon section rule it was even like that that at the heart of the center of this colon section that was also the biggest pile of poster of focal points so it in that sense it was it tells a lot about how we have learned to work with compositions and that these conventions work very strongly throughout all the designs of the posters at the same time we were also a little bit looking at what kind of focal points did we really cut out you already saw it in the presentation of Ellen and then you could really make or rearrange these focal points into certain subjects like the eyes very strong color contrast elements or even what also attracts our eye is of course typographical elements and this was another subject reading direction we have examined in which direction both image and text can be read within the poster and we separated them so this are all the lines of text text composition and if you compare it with the image you can see that the image is far more dynamic used and the text is really static and again these are stacked on each other so it's again all these images are actually visual data so when we were deconstructing our own deconstruction we found out this beautiful chaotic composition which we liked a lot so we made some pictures just to show you let's say how we also have worked with this composition but also as an inspiring image in between our process of working but then and it was also interesting in our whole research was that we worked in the beginning with a lot of analog methods and later on we started to do more digital deconstructing methods so we thought what you have seen in the first with the Queen in the red lines we thought maybe would be nice to bring in again the material of the posters so we took we took the same method of working but now with the very thin stripes of of the posters and then you get a complete different result in which let's say the material of the posters are still remaining and therefore maybe closer to what we wanted to achieve with our research. We wanted to achieve that the material tells the story itself. Reading root and that's another subject in the previous one we separated text and image but of course it's all one composition that you read so most of the posters are a combination of image and text so the reading route is a character per poster by drawing a line line between the main focal points in image and text. The hierarchy can be read off from the thickness of the line sometimes it's also nice to have like really aesthetic outcome which was at the same time also a little bit problematic for us sometimes because if the outcome is so aesthetically beautifully then you really start doubting a little bit the value or the extra value of the visual outcome and we what we tried to do in our research was to avoid let's say starting to design because as a graphic designer you are so trained to design interesting let's say visual messages and we had to avoid that in our process so in that sense we tried to design more a method of working which could lead to a visual outcome then then a design itself and this is about after image if you go through Amsterdam and you see all these posters they end they out in the city then you see so many posters biking from your studio to your home that you get almost a kind of visual narrative and it is interesting to see that if you see these posters for two seconds there's always this let's say this image which is like a after image on your in your eye which it stays there so what we did is we brought all these posters back to a kind of very con let's say to a hardcore image which was black and white which you could consider as an after image on your retina if you bring these images together into a kind of animation then you create a new kind of visual rhyme again and that's in fact what happens in your in your head if you bike through a city and this was for us a way to find out how that could work and if it could also be let's say concept for designing a poster and it's constantly three layers so you see the black becomes gray and lighter gray and then it disappears some people can remember five images maybe the thing we already know of course a lot of male and female images on posters especially the advertising posters the huge ones it's an important motive let's show it so this was something that we already knew so what we did we cut out again all the parts all the skin parts of the female and put them back in the same place we found them and stacked it up to each other this was the result and if you compare it with the male parts see it's a complete different image a lot of testosterone and a lot of Photoshop and blur and make it more smooth and more sexy and also the the amount of parts body parts you see is also pretty different but it's again it's so beautiful that now the material itself tells the story and proves itself another component which we're interested in was composition and form and if you look through a lot of posters what we already said in the beginning they seem to be based on dominant conventions and like some symmetrical constructions outline elements or geometrical shapes so what we did in this research is to abstract an image post the image into a very abstract form so that it is only the elements which you see like at the yellow triangle red color of field and a black shape in in the bottom two abstracted images like you saw before were connected with six in between steps and you get like intermediate colors you get intermediate forms and intermediate compositions the compositions colors and details that don't exist yet are not designed but come up in a technical area it's just made an illustrator you can make a transition between two forms but we made a transition between two posters so for us it was really inspiring and also shocking to see that we're used to make compositions with geometric forms or organic but this is something in between as you can see here and also yeah the small not really touching but almost touching almost annoying and came up and I think in my profession I bring it I think I bring it in because also here and also in this transformation you can ask yourself why let's say the beginning and the end of the posters we abstracted why do we use these compositions and not the ones in between what kind of possibilities could we learn or abstract extract from them that would be an interesting way of making funny new solutions for compositions with color and form and the same thing we did with the place but place where text is located so also here we abstracted the poster into very black and white compositions and also here we transformed from one poster to another poster which became almost like a constructed Russian constructs this constructivist is thank you thank you very much and you see your overview for one poster to another poster also in six or eight different six different steps then we did a deconstruction based on graphic forms graphic forms are normally used to bring in a poster a certain hierarchy to separate information from each other to be able to let's say put a lot of information on a poster and still make it accessible and readable for the viewer we were very interested in these specific forms itself how are they designed how do they look like how are they used are they only functional are they also used decorative or how can you look at these graphical forms so also in this case we deconstructed all the graphical forms out of the posters it was an enormous work because some of them were really really tiny and you had almost to take to take care not to cut in your fingers but it was really an interesting way of showing how these graphical forms together because they also are very let's say if you make them into a subject of a poster itself then they become suddenly rich and interesting and if sometimes if you see them in a poster where they are used they are almost invisible so it's and also we could ask ourselves where do they come from are they based on the tools we use all let's say in in design or illustrator or do we also create this take let's say this graphical forms ourselves it was really great to do this because for all the subject it was it is so nice that you can focus on one element of being a graphic designer normally you work with text with color with image and it's nice to do but now it was crazy to to just focus on one thing especially in this one it was really the outcome was really great I think then it will show some let's say some some color deconstructions in this deconstruction you see we took the two colors which were the main colors used in a poster so you have a big surface which is printed with color so which two colors are the most important colors used in a poster we cut them out in small pieces and then we arrange them in a different diagram which is in that sense a color diagram and if you do so you get an also an interesting information about how these colors are used and this in this case you see that there's still a lot of black and white which means that there's still a lot of contrast used in posters then you see that blue red and yellow is is is present and it completely right on the bottom you see four golden pieces of color which says something about the exclusivity of the printed matter but this was a way to show a little bit how we use color or what kind of colors we use more primarily in posters we had also some nice conversation with the distributors of the poster and we sat down with the guy and he was saying yeah if you have if you want to make good posters your designer you have to use yellow or red because that's that's the the signal color you have to use said okay let's do that so we separated all the yellow parts from the posters all the red parts from the posters all the blue parts of the posters and again this is not designed this is just getting them out of the existing composition and putting them back in the same place and the black part and and also in this post we were surprised by the outcome because it's again it's very beautiful aesthetically but at the same time it becomes almost like a black and white monochrome and you see all these different shades of black which is based on full-color black painting of spot color printing or so in so although we have a choice to only to take this color out it leads to an enormous potential when you look at this image by let's say the use in the color of black as a color this is the last subject of color we had the urge to compare every poster but how to start and where to start and what to do so what we did you can see it here the original poster we made a picture of it at 5 by 7 pixels and we again blew it up its original size so you only see like together all these posters together which resulted in an animation which was also very seducive and very tempting to look at that was it was nice to as image in which the invisible becomes something and the visible appears in nothing less I think this takes 20 minutes this animation is it okay that this is let's say the final that let's say image or animation we show just to say something about this artistic research I think we were very happy that we found a publisher who was really interested in publishing this research so that we really get a publication out of it I think it's also very important for a researcher that he can publish his work and that other people can take let's say knowledge of that we had and in that case we were surrounded with some very good people like the publisher like the ball your room from the bomb hard was our lecture and your clear based him he was an author who wrote about this research and gave it a really nice context being able to publish this book was also very good because therefore Alan bought his book in Amsterdam and that was of course for us we are very lucky with that because now we are standing here being able to present this research of ours in New York which is an amazing place to be an amazing place to present in this context of the Cooper you it our work so thank you Cooper you it thank you Alan and the whole team for having us so that would that was super great so we have about 15 minutes to talk and I had a few just comments or things I'm interested in that part of what you're doing is to to celebrate the undesigned right and to to find it is and it's there's a section in it right which I think is what makes art interesting right it's to find the most banal aspects of graphic design like my favorite piece in your project is the graphic elements poster where they took the stripes and the Greek circle and the violator splashes and and and put and made this poster that was only those pieces right that have the least meaning never focus on it right and they have no meaning that the function of those elements is only to make you look at something else exactly and then you took away the thing that we're supposed to look at so that we only see right the handmade right we see that in a sense it's graphic design that it's most naked right because that's what graphic design does is it makes you look at something else right the content the message and you've erased the message in the content and I think that is the most beautiful piece and and it also to me shows graphic design is something very fragile right these delicate little pieces of visual trash right that have been lovingly anyway maybe you talk a little bit about undesigned non-designed I think when it comes to graphic design you always try to make it let's say an image which can speak for itself when which is somehow is bringing across a message which can be understood by a lot of people but in this case we were not able to design let's say a new image we would somehow we have we found for ourselves a way to do making images that can somehow speak for themselves but just the method of working resulted in this visual outcome but I think it touches the principle of graphic design the same way as maybe that you have to make a whole new image bring across a message you have to communicate to a lot of people if you get an assignment then you make something but we gave ourselves now an assignment and so we could also choose our own way of working but I think in principle it was a very close to our natural profession of graphic design what we did yeah no I think you're right because graphic designers are often working with other people's typefaces other people's content other people's photographs other people's money right and that through all that being on the edge in the outside is then you make something right that people look at understand yeah and I think a lot of what you were focusing on in your comments was about creating these ways to generate images in which you were not designing right so there's in between forms and using the illustrator technique to create these ugly things right that are beautiful in their oddness right and they're not being touched by intentionality method that I that the poster play playing themselves into new compositions and for me it was really valuable yeah I like that the poster playing itself like a song right how about from the audience I'd love to hear your comments or thoughts or concerns or some of us might look at this research and the exhibition is well on table it's very formalist right that you're not interpreting the meaning of the posters right in a way this is a going back to a very modernist point of view but from I think very much from our own time is anybody disturbed by that we have great historians here of posters and the political poster we have political poster artists here who may see this is precious anyone want to have a comment yeah let's talk I thought it was very beautiful work so I'm not against it at all but I do have a question when you were putting together the the collages of the different pieces on each poster how did you decide what was in the foreground what was in the background did you think about that we forgot to say because we put all the big images on the back so that every part would be visible and sometimes it was the same size as maybe something is not visible but the idea was that everything was kind of mean like in the color study you would put the biggest black thing and then the next one and like a wedding cake yeah but we had a lot of discussion already about this color diagram because it was let's say different way of getting these colors in a different order so we could also have done it horizontally so it was a little bit how do we how do we make this color diagram so we then we could talk let's say two days about shall we do it horizontal shall we do it vertical shall we do it so that was there you already make somehow a decision in how to let's say in how to arrange this content and I think in the case of the female or male part that was much more based on this very honest principle about okay the biggest part underneath and then you make it even smaller and smaller it was more like a construct felt more like a construction yeah right here how I'm not sure if I missed this or not but I apologize if I did but how did you generate like a different versions of the colors did you handpick them or was it through some software and yeah no we really cut cut those colors out of the posters so we had this amount of posters and then we decided let's take out all the yellow parts with a knife and then considering what was the yellow part and then bring it back on the original position so there was no digital question involved after that we also tried digital because it was that much work and you also lose the material first when we collected all the posters we made them also digital we photographed every poster so that we always had the original image again was such a pity now the color what I told the anecdote about talking with the guy the distributor he said yellow and red are the most the best colors to use otherwise your poster is not good so it was a kind of reaction okay let's look for all the yellow and red parts and then after that we thought let's do also kind of the CMYK you know the black and the blue too because these distributors they have also a lot of research themselves I said to keep really track about how posters how effective these posters were when they made a campaign how many people have looked at these posters how many reactions are there how do people so that they also had do a lot of in turn research themselves and that's also why we came to this information we have a question if you wait for the microphone that way our internet audiences can hear your question is there in during this deconstruction process was there any one single thing that really surprised you in in when you got to that point for me it was what you already pointed out the that it's I call it the in between forms but it's what it's called again the yeah so that something was designed what was not designed it came up and normally I choose a form and I place it there and you created and now it was created and it was a kind of a gift of the software and that was a big gift for me to realize that you have to do something else sometimes than your normal yeah yeah and over here hi that was amazingly painstaking research so my question is how has that informed you how has your research informed you in moving forward in doing your own graphic design work that's a very good question of course and we had a lot of discussions about you know how can you what's the value of this research how can it help us to make a step forward maybe in designing visual messages I think what is interesting in this case is that on one hand the focus was more based on the fact how you could do artistic research what kind of tools do you have how can you develop those and what can that what kind of outcome can that give you and how can you then look to this to this outcomes and looking to this outcomes sometimes you were not so surprised because it was maybe quite predictable in the case of the focal points it was a little bit like okay you know it seems to be a very strict strong convention yeah maybe but at the same time by presenting it like this it becomes an awareness which we which you could still start we discuss you just re-discussing with yourself it's a value of this research is that if you look at all the outcomes somehow it gives you information which could maybe lead you more to a critical approach about making new graphic graphic design and designing rules too which I think it's so much of what people are doing now is creating these systems and generative systems I love that this is mostly by hand yeah I think right we would like to do more research this disproves itself so give me an assignment and I can prove it also on packages or product packages supermarket yeah another question hi hi my question is what are your thoughts on the future of the poster such as posters that change that are interactive but your face inside of them how far is your research gone in that sense yeah we did not really go in that field but I think that would be really interesting to find out what we could do with that kind of possibilities and I think this animation about after images I think is a good example for let's say how you could design new images for post images for the digital displays you nowadays also see in Amsterdam but at the time when we were doing this research process there was only printed posters in the city but now you find already the digital let's say displays in which you already see that designers take use of that and that's a telling a message not in one poster but let's say do it in three steps or in two steps which is of course yeah a new area to go into although I think if you can make one really good message that should be enough so it's maybe not always the best way that you have let's say the possibility to make ten posters you know it's can also be an excuse to to avoid the real concrete radical choice and design I guess yeah we have a question up here at the front okay excellent was there any part of the research that you didn't include in the book or did you use all of it we actually we put everything in the book the book is our process and I think that is really this is just a part of our projects actually we started doing a more a matrix kind of value-ness of posters being kind of a scientist or something because we thought yeah we're doing research we have to do it like this but then we said after that we tried it we said no we're graphic designers we want to work with the material so in the book it's explained and it's still the values we research what values poster can have or images can have are in the in the book and it's still amazing discussion a way to discuss with students for example or just with people or images or clients to see what they think the value of an image could be or but this this matrix was also an interesting start anyhow although we lost almost one and a half year with let's say constructing this matrix because we had a lot of discussions about how this poster functions in the public domain and how you could look at it and what was the motivation of the designer to make this poster and how can it be received by the public so it was really an interesting matrix and we in fact so there is a point when you thought you would do that because you've been eliminated that I find fascinating it was quite a shocking moment for us to be honest because it doesn't matter what it's about yeah it was really really helpful to to see that we had to do it with images it was a reaction on the previous research and I went here and then Colin we're so polite graphic designers so I'm very just think about doing some kind of sentimental analysis like because a lot of stuff you're working on here very interesting but I wonder what if you filter out the software graphic designed by the emotion status of the viewer right now in this case we tried we tried to develop methods that always have a degree of subjectivity but we try to exclude it the subjectivity so that's why we sticked on really the building blocks of the poster and not the meaning but I really I think I would really like to do that as as a part two of this project so let's but maybe with I'd love to see that in the supermarket like how do we respond emotionally to cereal and diet soda and meat or another city the posters of another city are also interesting another country yesterday we heard that in California they made no posters anymore in the city that's a pity yeah Colin I was kind of wondering that you talked to the distributor of the poster and I was wondering if you talked to anybody else in the step in the process of the posters being made like the printer the designers making the poster because they kind of strike me sort of is not like high graphic design but sort of like design for advertising or for just like really quickly made and what how they self like analyze them if they're making when they're making them yeah we did not talk with other designers or with printers about let's say our subject of posters that was in the beginning a little bit our purpose with this matrix to involve all kind of people who are related to posters let's say who have communication strategy or the people who print them or the people who design them and it was a really interesting talks because in these talks you could also find out that every person has complete different ideas about what a posters should how how a post should work or how a push how a post should be designed or how the relationship between the commissioner and a designer and and a distributor could be constructed in a way that you could make better posters and there's not all the designer at these systems and controls and the guy saying okay right yeah so I think we'll take one more question and then wait right here in the front so you're again my question is about your comments on subjectivity so color is an experience right and it's like a combination of you know your receptors and individual eyes and how brains interpret it do you think that an extension of your work would be to show an audience what individuals who may suffer with some kind of visual disease would actually see on because I was really amazed at your pixelated compositions and and I'm saying well you know males are more colorblind than females just because of you know it's on the X chromosome and all that stuff so what are they actually seeing right and I think it would be interesting to me it inspires you I hear it inspires you this so maybe you have to do the research I like that's a great idea actually we did this research all to inspire people to do more research that the poster in the streets what you say I'm not that interesting or that different or that yeah so we hope yeah I mean that's what I loved about your book was seeing a demonstration of design research and a methodology about using the visual material to express itself and I mean there's just so much richness there regardless of what you studied and I love the idea of adding so bringing in the viewer bringing in some other you know a reaction a reaction to the stuff anyway this was great fun the museum is open tonight so you can go see this show and check out the book and posters in the shop and all that and we'll hang out for a bit and talk with anybody that has more you'd like to discuss and thank you so much for coming to Cooper Hewitt and seeing posters and thanks to all my amazing volunteers and all the incredible staff here at the museum that put this whole crazy day together you're very grateful thank you