RB: What outside of design inspires you?
MB: I think visually what inspires us in the music world is the
mass amount of art that’s done by someone who isn’t a designer.
RB: Most of our ideas come out of conversations we have walking
back from a meeting. We’ll say, “Really what they’re looking
for is if Goodfellas and Traffic had sex together in Brazil, it would
be their bastard child.” And next thing you know it’s got this Brazilian,
gutsy, violent montage—not that we’ve ever done anything
like that.
ST: I think that’s true. Or a lot of it will come from making fun of
the project itself.
RB: Like maybe it should just be kittens. Why not? It’s cute and
dumb. It works.
ST: Stupid ideas can be similar to great ideas.
DI: I think most stupid ideas are like Aesthetic Apparatus promotional
items—they’re horribly inappropriate for our clients.
ST: What kind of stuff do you want to do outside of posters?
TOP: “The Melvins are known for their over-the-top, heavy sound and equally over-the-top sense of humor. With this poster we attempted to capture both qualities," say the designers at Aesthetic Apparatus. BOTTOM: Frango limited-edition packaging for Marchall Field's. DESIGN: Thares, Wink.
DI: You know, as much as we’re not really into the corporate
world, I think the best project would be something that every single
person would see. For lack of a better example, it would be
great if someone at Coca-Cola would ask us to put whatever we
want on a Coke can.
RB: Because you know when you see someone walking down
the street with your can in their hand, you’re going to think they
picked it up initially because they thought it was cool, they didn’t
care how it tasted.
DI: How about you guys?
ST: I think with every project, we try to make as much of an
opportunity out of it as we can.
RB: Actually that’s something that’s changed over the four years
we’ve been in business. I think the first year or two we were turning
a lot of things into creative opportunities that maybe weren’t
that way initially. And now I don’t think we have anything that
comes in that isn’t a great opportunity from the get-go.
DI: Where would you rather see your work—in a gallery or on a
street corner?
RB: On a street corner.
DI: We love it when we see our posters up around town and get
irritated when they’re not up.
ST: How many hours a week do you guys spend designing, versus
silkscreening?
DI: We probably print once a week.
MB: Posters are probably about 50 percent of our workload. It
depends on the time of the year. There’s usually a lot more going
on in the fall.
RB: Have you ever walked into someone’s house and they’ve had
your posters hanging up?
DI: We walked into a client’s studio and they had one of our posters
hanging up. It was uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to do.
MB: So Dan cried.
DI: I did break down. Then I gave them a big lecture on how
nothing is sacred, everything is disposable, and in this commercial
culture “you have no soul” and all that stuff. You know, the general
design spiel.
RB: Then you said, “It’ll be $20,000 for the next one!”
ST: Do you guys miss having us so close?
DI: Yeah, we really liked it when you’d yell “You suck!” from the
street up to our third-story window.
RB: Glad you liked that! That warms my heart. It was a preemptive
strike, ’cause if you guys get any better …
MB: You don’t have to worry about that.
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