Typeface design education from Cooper Union
Psychedelic lettering site

Psychedelic Lettering
with James Edmondson and Victor Moscoso

We’ll explore what makes this genre of interesting, beautiful, and an important part of the history of graphic design. The famous Fillmore poster designers of the past (Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoco, Rick Griffin, and others) left their mark on the world, creating elaborate designs that could make you feel stoned even if you weren't (but you probably were). By gaining an understanding of the driving forces behind their decisions, we can couple their ideas and techniques with principles of lettering, and apply it to a modern landscape. Rather than simply aping work of the past, we'll be focussed on a recipe that is personal, adaptable, and unmistakably contemporary.

On Sunday afternoon, Victor Moscoso will join the class giving critiques, pointers and stories. Psychedelic posters and their sources of inspiration will be pulled from Letterform Archive’s collection for view.

Registration is now closed

When:
Sat, July 22 – Sun, July 23, 2017

Where:
The Monotype Classroom at Letterform Archive
1001 Mariposa St. #304
San Francisco, CA 94107

About James Edmondson

James edmondson
After graduating from California College of the Arts, James received a masters from the TypeMedia program at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Netherlands. James lives in San Francisco, and runs OH no Type Company, an independent foundry focussed on display faces and expressive lettering.

About Victor Moscoso

Victor moscoso
Victor Moscoso is one of the premier artists of the psychedelic era. Raised in Brooklyn, he attended both Cooper Union and Yale (where he studied with Joseph Albers) before moving to San Francisco in the late 1950s. There he became a primary architect of the burgeoning underground hothouse that would produce brilliant posters, comic books, and album covers. Moscoso’s facility with color relationships and his remarkable ability to seamlessly blend images and lettering into a single entity was used to create a series of groundbreaking concert posters that propelled him to international fame. His posters feature dizzying hand lettering that push the very limits of negative space, and fierce battles between foreground and background. Along with Robert Crumb he was a founding member of the groundbreaking underground comic Zap Comix. Moscoso also designed numerous album covers for Jerry Garcia, Herbie Hancock and others.