TOP LEFT: CAMBRIDGE ARCHITECTURAL MESH rebranding campaign, 2004-2005, Designed by Bruce Willen at Shaw-Jelveh Design. These samples of Cam’s flexible mesh—sent to architects and designers—are rolled like sushi and bound with red wrappers to accentuate the colors of the stainless steel. MIDDLE LEFT: CAM LOGOTYPE. BOTTOM LEFT: 2003 POSTER This poster features a Bolex 8mm film camera that can be cut out and assembled to create a paper model of the vintage camera. RIGHT: POST TYPOGRAPHY'S POSTER SERIES, 2003-2005. 2005 POSTERS post typography defaces 1960s yearbook photos of Johns Hopkins students with John Waters-style mustaches and yearbook-esque doodles and witticisms.
It’s refreshingly difficult to identify Bruce Willen’s signature style;
he’s the kind of designer who embraces contradictions, thereby
challenging the parameters of his craft. Paul Carlos, principal of
New York’s Pure+Applied, says his former student is “pushing—
or better yet re-establishing—the idea of what a graphic designer
is.” The 24-year-old Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)
graduate divides his time between the offices of Baltimore’s Shaw-
Jelveh Design, where he recently played a key role in an innovative
rebranding for Cambridge Architectural Mesh, and his own studio,
Post Typography, which he runs with codesigner Nolen Strals.
In the glints of spare time, Willen teaches at his alma mater.
Carlos characterizes the partnership behind Post Typography
as “Wayne and Garth meets Chermayeff & Geismar. That’s
early Chermayeff & Geismar work—when you didn’t know exactly
what you were going to get but it was going to be fun and smart.” If
there is a unifying theme within the studio’s body of work, it stems
from the principals’ antidesign manifesto. Neither entirely serious
nor wholly flippant, it rails against a fascistic “Typocrisy” within
the design community. “It’s really about the fact that things with
no design can be as good or better than things guided by the
strong hand of design,” Willen explains.
In addition to their advocacy for an “undesign” aesthetic, Willen
and Strals want to give people something more interesting to
do with their work than look at it. No better example exists than
their poster for The Johns Hopkins University Film Fest, which—
when folded according to instructions—creates a 3D model of an
8mm Bolex camera.
So how does Willen reconcile the corporate nature of his day
job with the avant-garde manifesto of Post Typography? Rather
breezily: “It’s not something I feel conflicted about. Different
projects require different approaches, and that’s what I think is
most intellectually satisfying about design.”
Tiffany Meyers
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