PETRULA VRONTIKIS | JUDGE’S SELECTION

4 MENDEDESIGN
Two posters, dissimilar in form, imagery and tone, captured the admiration of every judge in this year’s Design 100. Petrula Vrontikis was happy to claim them as her personal Judge’s Selection. “The pieces are lyrical, spontaneous and expressive,” she says of Jeremy Mende’s posters for the American Institute of Architects (AIA) 2007 Monterey Design Conference and a film series held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Entered separately, the posters were paired by Vrontikis—a development not anticipated by the designer. “I was surprised they were combined,” Mende admits. “The movie poster uses strong diagonals and symbolism to communicate its message, whereas the AIA poster is almost entirely sculptural.”

But Vrontikis says she didn’t combine the two entries because they look alike. “I see them as two different songs, each showing the unmistakable mark of the musician. I was impressed with the artist’s voice coming through each poster and wanted to acknowledge him for that.”

So what is it that makes these two posters demonstrably the work of a single artist? The concept of style, ever resistant to definition, seems clearly inadequate as an answer. In Mende’s words, the link between the two is “a way of conjugating ideas, a set of expressive techniques, a way of abstracting concepts into visual expression.” The uniqueness of perception is at the heart of his method.

“Everyone has a set of filters that helps them make sense of things,” he remarks. “Those filters end up forming a person’s creative lens. The expressive engine may be the same, even though the results are different.”

If the two posters were at least superficially at odds, the Riefenstahl/Astaire example upped the stakes with its own internal tension. The films being promoted were Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Olympia, which extols Nazi perfection via the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire. Mende explains the pairing by noting the films’ “two disparate representations of the body in motion,” emphasizing that Olympia’s stolid geometry is the opposite of Astaire’s “languid, rhythmic, flowing sense of the body.” The poster that emerged incorporates typographical contrast to express the dichotomy. And in another doubling, it was designed so it could be cut into two posters to promote the films separately.

Mende employed a different strategy for the AIA Monterey Design Conference poster: repurposing forgotten technology and making something new out of it. The conference’s theme was Lateral + Vertical, which spurred thoughts of how two dimensions (the lateral and vertical) are translated into three through the practice of architecture. Although Mende refers to himself as a “second generation designer,” claiming “if it wasn’t for the computer, I probably wouldn’t be doing this,” the tools in this case were pure analog: Chartpak tape, an obsolete press-on medium for letters and rules (remarkably, it’s still produced). Analog (copy machine) and digital distortions were used to develop what he describes as “an idiosyncratic visual language” that depicts “the journey from 2D to 3D.”

Vrontikis found the results stunning. “I am hypnotized by the fl owing contours of the Monterey Design Conference poster,” she says. “I appreciate the artist giving me so much to contemplate. Is it an abstract landscape, a score of John Cage’s music or information graphics on mushrooms? It doesn’t matter; it’s absolutely beautiful.” by Tom Biederbeck

MendeDesign | Art Director: Jeremy Mende | Designers: Amadeo DeSouza, Steven Knodel, Jeremy Mende | Clients: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; American Institute of Architects, California Council | Contact: www.mendedesign.com