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Recently, Shepard Fairey 'redesigned' the Rolling Stones' logo for their fiftieth anniversary.
Brilliant work, Shep. Just brilliant. I can really see you sweated blood on this one. Changing the white to your signature off-white, skewing it, and putting no less than five different fonts in? Beautiful. This really shows why you're one of the most respected graphic designers of today.
I think you were maybe a little verbose there, though. Here, I fixed it for you.
Brilliant work, Shep. Just brilliant. I can really see you sweated blood on this one. Changing the white to your signature off-white, skewing it, and putting no less than five different fonts in? Beautiful. This really shows why you're one of the most respected graphic designers of today.
I think you were maybe a little verbose there, though. Here, I fixed it for you.
Category All / All
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I just read all four books of the Bartimaeus trilogy, I think the title character's snark rubbed off on me.
Oh who am I kidding, I've been a snarkbasket for years.
Oh who am I kidding, I've been a snarkbasket for years.
Seriously. Fuck that guy. You saw my comment on BB, right? All this piece of shit is doing is taking up room in the art world for someone with a skill besides self-promotion, or a vision beyond "Hey! Dig me!"
You loathe him for being an insincere artist, I loathe him for being an insincere propagandist, it's a match made in heaven really.
You loathe him for being an insincere artist, I loathe him for being an insincere propagandist, it's a match made in heaven really.
Well, I just tweeted it at their official twitter. Let's see if there's any response!
Frankly, I can't join in on the Shepard hatred. I mean, his background is street art, am I not correct? And a major aspect of street art is recontextualization, that's just one of the tools in that genres artistic arsenal, and if you're complaining that they are not original in this case, you're missing a big part of the point. I've never seen him deny it, and he did talk quite candidly about it with how the "HOPE" poster was based on a press photo (that was AFTER he got in trouble for it, mind)
That being said, I guess I feel the same about this as I feel about sampling in hip hop, if you're an underground artist, sample away, who the fuck's gonna stop you? It's unlikely that any huge signed artist will care about you ripping a few seconds off them, since it doesnt affect their cash flow. But once you start making millions of dollars off it, you really should give the original proper credit, or else you're being quite a douchebag.
Also, saying he did nothing is selling designers everywhere short. Minor things like colour, changes in shapes and fonts, really go a LONG WAY when you're dealing with something that's very simple and iconic to begin with and saying this is nothing really shits on just about anyone that's ever had to deal with logo design and staring on a whole bunch of nearly identicial design concepts, trying to find the one that looks JUST RIGHT.
With you, Peg, I just suspect hyperbole since I know you know more than enough about design to know this, but I'm afraid that a lot of the commentors really believe that this is litterary doing nothing, and that is completely wrong and a very arrogant notion. Granted, his design looks like complete ass, but that just proves my point. He manages to fail spectacularly in a very limited ammount of space.
The major problem with Shepard is that he's basically grown out of its own genre. There's no recontextualization in this, its just a logo going from one design to a slightly more cluttered design. Unless the recontextualization is that it's been touched by a famous artist... which, let's be real, it's basically what it is. Still, complaining about Shep strikes me as having more than a little tinge of sour grapes to it.
That being said, I guess I feel the same about this as I feel about sampling in hip hop, if you're an underground artist, sample away, who the fuck's gonna stop you? It's unlikely that any huge signed artist will care about you ripping a few seconds off them, since it doesnt affect their cash flow. But once you start making millions of dollars off it, you really should give the original proper credit, or else you're being quite a douchebag.
Also, saying he did nothing is selling designers everywhere short. Minor things like colour, changes in shapes and fonts, really go a LONG WAY when you're dealing with something that's very simple and iconic to begin with and saying this is nothing really shits on just about anyone that's ever had to deal with logo design and staring on a whole bunch of nearly identicial design concepts, trying to find the one that looks JUST RIGHT.
With you, Peg, I just suspect hyperbole since I know you know more than enough about design to know this, but I'm afraid that a lot of the commentors really believe that this is litterary doing nothing, and that is completely wrong and a very arrogant notion. Granted, his design looks like complete ass, but that just proves my point. He manages to fail spectacularly in a very limited ammount of space.
The major problem with Shepard is that he's basically grown out of its own genre. There's no recontextualization in this, its just a logo going from one design to a slightly more cluttered design. Unless the recontextualization is that it's been touched by a famous artist... which, let's be real, it's basically what it is. Still, complaining about Shep strikes me as having more than a little tinge of sour grapes to it.
A little research on the history of the Stones' logo when I was doing this suggested that actually the two-highlight version Fairey used is something the Stones had been using for ages, after modifying the original one. His entire contribution seems to have been switching it to the same red-and-tan palette he uses for everything, and putting type on it. And not very good type. This is him phoning it in over a shitty connection.
I can also imagine scenarios where he actually worked on this and gave Jagger some really good concepts that kept on being rejected and threw this together in like ten minutes out of frustration, but honestly that feels like bending over to give him the benefit of the doubt when I look at his career; his entire ovure consists of "here is some stuff I traced in red and black on an off-white ground". Some of it is traced very meticulously, which I suppose certainly qualifies as not doing "nothing" - but only in physical terms; his creative contribution to all of his work that I've seen is always very minor.
YMMV.
I can also imagine scenarios where he actually worked on this and gave Jagger some really good concepts that kept on being rejected and threw this together in like ten minutes out of frustration, but honestly that feels like bending over to give him the benefit of the doubt when I look at his career; his entire ovure consists of "here is some stuff I traced in red and black on an off-white ground". Some of it is traced very meticulously, which I suppose certainly qualifies as not doing "nothing" - but only in physical terms; his creative contribution to all of his work that I've seen is always very minor.
YMMV.
My guess is that he was trying to make it look cheap, like something you'd see an underground band do because they don't HAVE a graphic designer. The fact that he reverted back to an old logo does make it seem that this is what he was going for, something that called to mind the early days of RS which... yeah, it's about as pointless as buying name-brand clothes designed to look like something you'd pick up at a trift store. It's a stupid concept, but at least it's a concept.
Like I said before, this approach really only works as underground street art, where the mere act of applying it is of questionable legality and the whole thing is about defience and using what you have around you to express yourself. The medium is the message and all that. Once this starts being a legitimate thing that you earn money on, a lot of the edge has taken away from it. It's a different medium that just can't convey the same message. To take the logo for example, as a bootlegged t-shirt it'd make a statment... as the official 50 year anniversity logo... it just looks kinda cheap.
But here's the thing, if I where to call Shepard a hack, I'd have to call every other street artist who uses the EXACT SAME METHODS a hack, and I don't feel comfortable with that, because I still think there's expressive potential in this approach, even if it's not the type of street art I personally like. Writing off an entire genre of art just like that, because I deem from my ivory tower that it doesn't require "skills" sounds like a pretty limiting point of view. In fact it sounds like exactly the SAME point of view that makes some people look down on cartoons or comic book art as not requiring skill because it isn't photorealistic.
Like I said before, this approach really only works as underground street art, where the mere act of applying it is of questionable legality and the whole thing is about defience and using what you have around you to express yourself. The medium is the message and all that. Once this starts being a legitimate thing that you earn money on, a lot of the edge has taken away from it. It's a different medium that just can't convey the same message. To take the logo for example, as a bootlegged t-shirt it'd make a statment... as the official 50 year anniversity logo... it just looks kinda cheap.
But here's the thing, if I where to call Shepard a hack, I'd have to call every other street artist who uses the EXACT SAME METHODS a hack, and I don't feel comfortable with that, because I still think there's expressive potential in this approach, even if it's not the type of street art I personally like. Writing off an entire genre of art just like that, because I deem from my ivory tower that it doesn't require "skills" sounds like a pretty limiting point of view. In fact it sounds like exactly the SAME point of view that makes some people look down on cartoons or comic book art as not requiring skill because it isn't photorealistic.
I dunno, I think you may be overanalyzing. I feel like I can say "Shepard Fairey is crap as an artist and as a designer, and very good at self-promotion" without offending every single designer and street artist out there. I've seen good street art - hell, I live a couple blocks from a public graffiti wall, and that regularly makes me happy.
I was mostly just objecting to the notion that doing just a slight redesign of a logo is lazy, 'cus I can think of many instances where just a slight change in front or colour did a lot to bring out a different side of the design. Heck, all hell broke loose when they changed the font of the IKEA logo from futura to verdana, and while that might be an extreme example, it shows that thiny details like that DOES matter when you deal with something as iconic and ubiquitous as a logo.
This is really a case of me objecting more to many of the comments this piece has generated than the piece itself. I've tried to make it clear when I'm speaknig directly to you and when I'm looking around and going "really?" But I apologize if I've been confusing.
I really don't think Shepard is a crap artist because he traces, as some of the comments pretty much suggests, because that's pretty much his entire artistic concept, to take random images like the musgshot of an old wrestler and turn them into propaganda. That on it's own is an interesting, if not necesserily original, commentary on society, and I'm not gonna lie and say I didn't enjoy that very much. I still like him as an artist cus he's done a lot to promote street art, (and himself, yeah) but I can't hep but agree that if you take away that context, he's really just a colour scheme and the threshold function in photoshop.
Am I making sense? I see him as more "decent street artist who got waay more popular than his style can back up" which is kind of a difficult distinction to argue for, but one I think need to be make cus there's really nothing horribly bad about his design aside from the fact that it should be a sticker on a telephone pole, not the official anniversity logo of one of the largest rock bands in history.
They recently closed the public grafitti wall next to me, it was always awesome to see what sort of thing the local artist cooked up next and I'll never forget the awesome supermario grafitti that appeared one day... and now it's a dull, gray wall. *sigh* makes me wanna bring out the spray paint...
This is really a case of me objecting more to many of the comments this piece has generated than the piece itself. I've tried to make it clear when I'm speaknig directly to you and when I'm looking around and going "really?" But I apologize if I've been confusing.
I really don't think Shepard is a crap artist because he traces, as some of the comments pretty much suggests, because that's pretty much his entire artistic concept, to take random images like the musgshot of an old wrestler and turn them into propaganda. That on it's own is an interesting, if not necesserily original, commentary on society, and I'm not gonna lie and say I didn't enjoy that very much. I still like him as an artist cus he's done a lot to promote street art, (and himself, yeah) but I can't hep but agree that if you take away that context, he's really just a colour scheme and the threshold function in photoshop.
Am I making sense? I see him as more "decent street artist who got waay more popular than his style can back up" which is kind of a difficult distinction to argue for, but one I think need to be make cus there's really nothing horribly bad about his design aside from the fact that it should be a sticker on a telephone pole, not the official anniversity logo of one of the largest rock bands in history.
They recently closed the public grafitti wall next to me, it was always awesome to see what sort of thing the local artist cooked up next and I'll never forget the awesome supermario grafitti that appeared one day... and now it's a dull, gray wall. *sigh* makes me wanna bring out the spray paint...
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