Kunst Kunst Kunst is an arts ball by artists, for artists, art students, art friends and art lovers. It’s a club night mixing live performances, films, bands, and DJ sets by the arts community in Sheffield. It builds on the legacy and spirit of Sheffield Art School, which was originally part of Sheffield Polytechnic. I was happy to be asked to design a new poster in collaboration with artist Yuen Fong Ling.

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

The largest archived poster is A2, meaning that 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-referential archive was created by referencing the dates and artists from the selected archived posters.

I really didn’t want to add anything new to the existing poster’s typography, so the new event information (edits included) was added quickly to the pile as a simple hand-written A5 ‘flyer’ on a scrap of paper from the studio floor. This decision was informed by the museum and gallery posters designed by artist Robert Rauschenberg, and in the spirit of Rauschenberg, the poster was completed in one morning.

Here are some of the posters from the archive that were selected for the new poster.

The posters functioned as both an archive and as a self contained notice board (the notice board is still an important place in art schools). When the posters were stuck up on the art school’s actual notice boards, they became a curious mix of both blending in and standing out, with the archive re-produced at its original actual size stuck up alongside current student notices.

See below: