PETER MURPHY POSTER SACRAMENTO 2009

No, it’s not your brightness. It’s a black on black poster.

“NONE MORE BLACK”

For years I wanted to do a black-on-black poster. Black ink, black paper, only fully visible when the light hits the ink of the design. But you can’t just do a thing like that for anybody. For one, a poster is still a way to promote a thing, so it needs to be made for something that’s going to sell out on its own anyway. Second, it of course has to fit thematically with the artist it’s for. And at least in 2009, as of press time, Spinal Tap weren’t doing shows.

CONCEPT AND PROCESS

Enter: Peter Murphy, king of goth from his post-punk days in Bauhaus up through the decades to now. I finally had a good fit. The imagery is a mix of hard-edged Eastern European line and Bauhaus-inspired flourishes, including a few instances of the famous Bauhaus symbol hidden in the design itself, alongside more recent references to his solo career: Marlene Dietrich, smoking from an eye that’s also a mouth, dead center.

SIMPLICITY BRINGS ITS OWN CHALLENGES

You actually can’t simply print black on black and expect magic. I tried a number of combinations of papers and inks until I cracked the code for the cocktail that worked. It came down to a toothsome matte black recycled stock with an inky rich black achieved with all fountains on full. That gave the optimal combination, keeping the integrity of the concept without looking ineffective and inert. This poster announced itself. If you were in the room with it, you could feel it. It didn’t just look like a black piece of paper, it had a presence. And since the light activated the gloss of the ink, the poster appears to shimmer as you move around it in real space. This is one of my most underrated pieces, but the ones who get it really get it.

I’d return to that same push-and-pull of light and dark years later for Patterson Hood’s 2013 poster.

Below is a detail of the art itself….