'Herman Miller: Summer Picnic 2002' by Brian Edlefson, 2002
24 x 36 Inches
Offset lithograph on fine art paper dry-mounted to foam core (previously framed).
Printed by Continental Screen Printing, Aurora, CO.
Open Edition (Sold Out).
This piece is in the Library of Congress Permanent Collection.
*Note: Small dent at center (see photo). Also markings along the edges from previous framing, some handling (see additional photos).

ABOUT THE ART

In 1970, Herman Miller hired its first in-house graphic designer, a bright-eyed Cranbrook graduate named Steve Frykholm. Among his initial assignments was the task of designing a poster to promote the company’s annual picnic. Little did he know that the resulting poster would spark an ambitious series that has since made its way into countless museum collections and firmly landed him on the short list of Herman Miller’s illustrious design alumni.

We sat down to chat with Frykhom about the benefits of being in house and the transformative quality of a really great poster. A good poster—a poster that is really communicating an idea—is still relevant. There are so many different kinds of posters: informational posters, promotional posters, commemorative posters. To me, a poster is really nothing more than a postage stamp, except big. And I think posters should be large. They should be at least 24 x 36 inches, if not larger.

The other day, Anne Sutton [a graphic designer at Herman Miller] and I were working on a new design and I said, “Let’s go downtown to the clubs. I want you to look at the posters in the windows. We’ll go across the street, and you tell me which ones you notice and why. The better designed ones really do read from across the street.”

It’s so easy for a designer working on their monitor to just fall in love with their design and think it’s the greatest, but in reality if you take that little project and put it among the thousands of designers who are working on a similar product, it falls into that same sea of sameness.

What makes a design unique, original, inventive, imaginative, and compelling? What are those attributes that really make your design really stand out amongst the crowd? I think the dimensionality comes from the person designing it, if that makes any sense. The design has to have presence.

Drawing on that idea of designers falling so easily in love with the images on their screens—do you think there’s something about working analog with tactile material that is beneficial to poster design?I’m really disappointed I didn’t learn to work on the computer earlier in my career; it’s a great tool. At the same time, I think it can be uncomfortable for a young designer who has never really worked that much with scissors, pencils, and pieces of tape—or even glue or crayons or photographs—to understand the process. I find value in making collages before I actually get a design into the computer to wrap it up and make a file so it can be printed. Analog and digital are both important. I’ve been working analog all morning long on a new poster, but now that I put it in the computer, it’s going much faster. Of course, you can also go down a rabbit hole on the computer.

Fair (See Description/Photos)

36 x 24 in