adrian is rad

Inside of Bumbershoot 2006 was Flatstock 10 a silk-screened (indie rock) poster show from dozens of artists from around the country. It was really cool and possibly one of my favorite parts of the day at Bumbershoot.

There are a lot of artists with a variety of styles. There were two sort of camps, the ones that went for the old psychadellic poster style that’s common of posters in the late 60s—bubble lettering and bright colors—and then there’s the camp that’s more into simple graphical silk screens and more standard fonts. I personally like the second style a lot, but I saw good posters in each camp at the show. I could have easily spent hundreds of dollars there.

My local (Oakland-based) favorite, the Small Stakes was there. I love Jason’s posters. They’re simple but great. He may over-use the heart in his designs but that’s pretty appropriate for that sort of indie pop that he’s designing posters for. I picked up two from him: a Jose Gonzalez one from the Swedish American Hall show that I went to (normally I would have bought it from Jason at that show, but Jason was out of town for it) and an awesome Mates of State poster that he did:

That brings my total small stakes posters up to six (one, two, three, four, five, six). What can I say? I like his stuff and I like buying posters from shows I go to (which is the case for all but one).

I also ran into a few Pittsburgh artists, which I thought was pretty cool. Budai (Michael Budai) lives in Pittsburgh and does his work for Pittsburgh shows. It was cool seeing posters for places like the Roboto Project and Garfield Art Works. I ended up buying a cool hand silkscreened/ hand drawn little character (Monocle Man, who is saying “I really think monocles should make a comeback”) from him. Really cute. He was a really nice guy and we talked about Pittsburgh for a bit.

There was also Strawberry Luna (samples) who shares a space for Budai, but she produces show posters for Philly venues. Her stuff is good too. I ended up buying an art print (“E is for Elephant”) from her.

And finally, there was the Pittsburgh–>SF transplant Lil Tuffy (myspace, view samples). His work has a pretty big range from the surreal to the psychedelic to the simple graphics. He and I talked about SF Steelers bars and he gave me a Tuffy pin which has the US X hypercycloid (aka the Steelers logo) along with ‘Tuffy’ on it.

There were other cool poster designers there, of course. Some of the big ones and some little guys who were obviously just getting their start (one guy named Zack, in particular, was particularly fresh-faced and nervous looking). I had a fun time looking around at all the stuff that was displayed. I took particular note of the above ones but I’m sure if I’d kept more careful track, I could have written about a bunch more of the designers.