 Today we're here on Governor's Island doing a quick walkthrough of the exhibition Graphic Design Now in Production. Graphic design is way more than a little JPEG that you see on the internet. Graphic design is printing, it's binding, it's big. Graphic design is 2D and 3D. Graphic design is finished work, but it's also process and tools. Graphic design is a physical activity as well as a digital one and you can come and see the incredible craftsmanship that goes into graphic design. The surface of everything we look at is alive with meaning. Our exhibition is in a historic building on Governor's Island and we have transformed the space with a system of walls and stripes and graphics that really bring it alive and create a really fun and engaging atmosphere. So I'm going to do a very quick tour. So this is the lost poster wall for the 21st century and so the piece is an update on the idea of posters on the street that pile up on top of each other and become kind of an urban collage. But these posters are being generated constantly and the designers have created a software system that is making these posters from information on the internet, from different feeds related to what's going on in New York, but also international feeds from blogs and newspapers and Twitter and so forth. And the public can make their own poster by sending a tweet with the hashtag poster wall and the system will instantly, nearly instantly create an original poster based on that tweet. And so as you walk down this hallway, we have these amazing examples of contemporary poster designers who are using the medium in different ways, sometimes for purely visual experiments playing with the software, you know, standard software in new ways. So these are posters made with Adobe Illustrator that kind of twist the system and create these very disturbed letter forms out of a tool that's normally used in a more normative way. These are posters by Anthony Burrell who uses letter press to create posters that are printed in a very traditional fashion. And instead of advertising a product, he advertises his own philosophy. And so all of these are statements about, you know, being a member of society and how to work hard and be nice and speak your mind. Here we have the poster machine and it's a system for people to make their own posters. And basically what it is is an input device here where you can type in a word and then you send it to this cutter, which is really just a very basic vinyl cutting machine that's been re-purposed for cutting paper. And it punches holes out of the paper that spell out the word that people type. So this is a project by So So Limited. So what you're seeing here is a TV set that's playing just daytime televisions, just what happens to be coming through the channel. And the designers have created software that takes the closed caption feed from the television and is constantly processing it using natural language processing software to create different typographic spectacles on the wall behind us. It was very interesting to us as the curators of the show to notice the explosion of publishing that's taking place right now. And for all the talk of the death of print, there's actually more print than ever before. And lots of people are able to get into the print industry through the tools of graphic design. There's some notable things in this case in particular. There's this series of books called Modernist Cuisine, which is the most ambitious and expensive cookbook in history. And it is published by its author, a former Microsoft employee who has invested much of his fortune into the creation of this outstanding book. This is a project by Daniel Itach that was also commissioned for our exhibition. And he's made this series of prints by laying pieces of paper on top of a grid of open magic markers. And so each print is unique. And each print is made simply by the paper drawing the ink up into its absorbent surface. Likewise, these are prints created by aesthetic apparatus in Minneapolis. And this is a design group that makes posters for bands. And they're screen printed posters, which is again a hand process. And these particular posters are actually made from scraps. So it's a technique called a make ready, which is a poster that's not being used, that's printed on again in the process of testing the screen. So each of these posters is actually a layer of several posters that just get arbitrarily put together. And they're part of the work process. They're part of the residue of printing and designing the real thing. This is an installation called Face State, which was also commissioned for our exhibition. It was created by Metahaven, which is a partnership of designers from the Netherlands. And Metahaven is known for their critical work. They do projects that don't only serve a client, but actually serve as social commentary. And that use design to represent alternate realities or to create identities for organizations that don't actually exist. So they use the tools of graphic design to tell a story and create a kind of fiction. So in this case, what they've created is a brand for a government of the future called Face State, in which social media replaces the bricks and mortar government of today. They call it the ultra minimal government, which is certainly a play on style and fashion and our kind of Apple world love of simple things. Continuing on the idea of branding, we often think about branding as exclusively commercial. But branding also affects individuals. This is a designer who created a brand for himself. And it's sort of a parody of branding campaigns created for corporations. Christof Spejdel is a designer who exclusively creates logos for death metal and heavy metal bands. He's done hundreds of them. He does it for bands all around the world. And he's kind of become the, he's known as the dark lord of logos. And so these are original drawings by Christof. And if you come in close, you'll see that there's like type that shows through the back. So his process is that when he gets a request from a new client, usually via email, he prints out the email, which has all the information of what the band wants. Or they want daggers and fire and dripping things in the backwards F and whatever. And then he does the drawing on the other side so that he has a record of the client's brief together with his artwork. There's a fantastic music video in which the band created video of themselves and kind of dancing in relation to the music. And then they invited the public to upload single frames from that dance sequence. And then the designers put it all together to create this continuous animated piece in which those stills provided by the users keep interrupting the motion of the artist. So here we're looking at graphic designers who become involved in developing products. So you see examples here of t-shirts, of wrapping paper, of stationery. From here in New York City, Best Made Company run by Peter Buchanan Smith is a brand built around a beautiful axe. And Peter created this great business inspiring urban people to buy an axe, which is sort of a miracle of marketing. And they're incredible handmade objects. You see wallpaper here, all created by graphic designers. These are two beautiful bird houses where the designer and working with a sculptor has created a series of one-of-a-kind bird houses that all reference different urban buildings. So this is a tattoo parlor and a mortuary, very unique and funny with all hand-painted lettering. So we're very excited to have the show here on Governor's Island. It's really terrific.