Production Lesson(s)

AIGA Houston was pleased to recently host Ben Barry, the man behind the Analog Research Laboratory at Facebook, for a one night speaking engagement. His letterpress and screen printed posters of inspirational quotes and self-assurance principles dot Facebook's Menlo Park campus, and they help to engender a powerful and collaborative internal culture at Facebook.

Taking inspiration from Barry's guerrilla-design-tactical approach with his own work, we chose to hand-make posters to promote the event. The production needed to be easy and fast, and the process as collaborative as possible in order to keep with Barry's ideals. Since the owners and nearly all the staff at Workhorse Printmakers are AIGA members, letterpress and wood type were a natural production choice. The general consensus was whatever we made should be colorful—in the words of one of our programming directors: "some California-ass shit." We came up with using neon spray paint and stencils, then formed an assembly line of people spraying the stencils with others letterpress printing the type.

As the process progressed, our poster board stencil degraded and warped heavily, leading to interesting variations in the final posters. No two posters are alike.

In general, the act of making something together was ultimately more important than what was produced. We took the opportunity to blog, Instagram, and tweet the entire process. And, in retrospect, the documentation did more to drive interest in the event than the distribution of the finished poster.

Design Credits Extended:

Jennifer Blanco, Vice President
John Earles, Director of Education Programming
Roby Fitzhenry, Associate Director of Impact Programming
Tyler Swanner, Director of Impact Programming
Anthony Reynolds, Associate Director of Community Programming
Talin Tcholakian, Associate Director of Public Relations
Josh Higgins, Associate Director of Education Programming