Kunst Kunst Kunst is arts ball by artists, for artists, art students, art friends and art lovers. A club night mixing live performances, films, bands, DJ sets by the arts community in Sheffield. It builds on the legacy and spirit of Sheffield Art School, originally part of Sheffield Polytechnic. I was happy to be asked to design a new poster for their latest night.

Having not been involved in any of the past events, I found I had access to 15 years worth of carefully archived posters and flyers. The idea was to pay service to the legacy, by getting out of the way and letting the existing typography do the work by folding and layering selected posters from the archive. Very much in the spirit of art school.

The largest archive poster is A2, meaning it and the smaller A3, A4 and A5 materials could comfortably fit on a new A1 poster and be printed at their original 1:1 size. A new kind of self referencial archive was created by referencing the dates and artists from the selected archive posters.

I really didn’t want to add anything new to the existing posters typography, so the new event information as added quickly to the pile as a simple hand written A5 ‘flyer’ on a scrap of paper from the studio floor. What would Rauchenberg do?

Here are a few of the posters from the archive.

The notice board is still an important place at art school. Some of the posters become a curious mix of both blending in and standing out. A few quick examples below: