Synchronistic design

We print for a number of clients, and they all (obviously) have different aesthetic tastes, and gravitate towards different poles on the design axis. What is interesting–to me, anyway–is when those varied and disparate aesthetic sensibilities happen to converge in synchronistically notable and/or straight up uncanny ways. Sometimes we’ll receive a handful of orders all at once, and while none of the clients have any relationship to one another, the cluster of jobs will have a unifying theme of some sort. Color palettes will converge, or a specific (and otherwise singular-seeming) design element will appear in all of them, etc., etc., etc. I always enjoy it, because it is just one of those wonderfully banal-yet-mysterious, boring-yet-hilarious parts of being a person, and I gotta say, I really appreciate glimmering crap like that. Sometimes even, when life is hard or work is horrible, being faced with this phenomenon in its most blatant manifestation can effectively shake me out of whatever myopic funk I’ve been in. It’s like, hey! Lighten up! Life is difficult, but it’s also funny if you get out of your own head and pay attention to it.

This is a dialed down version of that. Yeah it’s not as extreme as some of the iterations we’ve encountered, but I never documented those, so there you go! (A person has got to start somewhere, don’t they?) Anyway, we printed these posters this week for the Capitol Hill Block Party poster show (which opens tonight at 7pm at V2–the old Capitol Hill Val Vill!). Yeah, they all happen to be for the same event, but that’s precisely the point! I hadn’t noticed the very real color commonality that exists in this grouping until I rounded them all up and saw them together. Seen together like this, it feels like each design passed the aesthetic baton to the design that came next–like they’re playing a game of cosmic telephone with one another or something. Ahh, artistic creation and its relation to the collective unconscious–I love it! Ok, enough of me, yeah? Take a look for yourself!

Washed Out / 1 color poster / designed by Jordan Butcher (Studio Workhorse)