Gallery: 9 Emerging Graphic Designers You Should Know
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum016824-5-2014 Matt Flynn
The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum's current exhibition, *How Posters Work*, includes legendary designers as well as promising newcomers. Here is work from some of the latter, like this concert-schedule flyer by Dutch design collective Experimental Jetset. Curatorial assistant Caitlin Condell says the work was chosen because the designers cleverly created little bullet holes that would let the texture of other concert flyers show through. It's a nod to punk culture, mimicking the collage-like fashion people would wear patches and t-shirts with band logos.
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Sulki and Min are a South Korean husband-and-wife team who met at Yale. They're the only Korean designers in the Cooper Hewitt. This poster blends a wide variety of type styles to promote dancer Eunme Ahn’s performance of *Three Questions on Death*.
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For the poster "Cabbage Thoughts," Sulki and Min created type suggestive of the eponymous dance performance. Layered curving bands form the letters and blend with the rendering of a cabbage, an essential ingredient of the Korean national dish kimchi and a motif used in the dance production.
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Condell says Australian designer Mark Gowing would likely call himself a typographer, but "a lot of people look at the text as an image before they realize what it says."
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One of the youngest designers to be newly acquired, Felix Pfaffli is an "incredible powerhouse," Condell says. This risograph print, made using a technique similar to but cheaper than screen-printing, for the band Future Islands has the effect of turning a poster into a source of light.
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“Something Felix plays with is the scale of depth," Condell says. This poster is also a risograph, a trend among younger designers.
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"In Between He Jianping," by Chinese designer Jianping He. His posters often treat type and letterforms as objects rather than just 2-D shapes. Here, they're like smears of paint.
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For the "Detour Design Show," He modified a typeface so that the ends of letters trail off into meandering lines, much the way thoughts do.
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A Japanese designer working in Berlin, Shiro Shita Saori created this poster, called "Life," for the Numazu Deep Sea Aquarium in Japan.
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Saori designed this poster, "Media Literacy Is an Imagination," for the Ad Council of Japan as a modern, stylized play on the monkeys that often represent the maxim “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
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For the poster "The Core," Saori comments on the tradition in Japanese posters to use a big circle in the center as a nod to the country’s flag.
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Theseus Chan is "really interested in the hand being involved," Condell says. The artist crumbled each copy of this poster for magazine *WERK* by hand.
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Philippe Apeloig is one of the most established designers to be newly acquired. “I felt he was an important designer that the museum would need to document," Condell says. This print, titled "Street Scene," was for a 2012 theater production in Paris.
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Apeloig created this inky, smudgy poster, titled "Bruits du monde," ("sounds of the world") for a library in Aux-de-Provence, France.
