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Context Is Everything
Silkscreen Collaboration
for James Victore’s 40th Birthday
2002, Poster design
Self-initiated
1 of 1

We were talking about 9/11 at the office yesterday and I remembered this poster I designed (with Nicholas Blechman and Christoph Niemann) back in January of 2002. It was a present for fellow designer James Victore’s 40th birthday (copies of the poster were handed out at the party).

This poster (in 2008) reminds me how important context is to the work we do as graphic designers. Looking at it now, the poster doesn’t make any sense, at least in terms of the original intent. It’s missing the context of the moment in which it was designed. At the time, we were inundated by patriotic messages during the period directly after September 11, 2001. These types of messages were strange to see on the streets of NYC.

This was before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. It was before the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The poster relied on the current environment and was designed to be yet another (but in this case intentionally) lame ultra-patriotic message, which was ‘ironic,’ since Mr. Victore himself would typically only employ an American flag if it was the tongue of a skull or something.

Perhaps this is a subtle observation, but one of the reasons the poster was ironic is now gone. The context has changed. The poster is still ironic, but in a different way than originally intended. And of course irony itself was declared dead around the time the poster was designed. For me, a purposefully-lame-yet-somehow-good poster in 2002 is now just a lame poster in 2008.

Therefore a question occurs to me: How much consideration should a designer give to how his/her work is understood in the future? Is this even possible? And even if it is possible, is everything we design doomed to be misunderstood and lame eventually anyway?