Studio Note #09: Nothing Great Exists in a Vacuum.

In the early 2000s, there was a clothing brand called 2K by Gingham.

Beyond making great apparel, they had a habit of collaborating with some of the most exciting graphic designers working at the time. Studios like Experimental Jetset and designers like Geoff McFetridge brought a level of thoughtfulness to t-shirt graphics that felt completely different from everything else on the rack.

Long before social media made it easy to follow the people behind the work, this was one of the ways I discovered new designers. I'd buy the shirt because I liked the graphic, then track down the studio that created it and explore everything else they had made.

Experimental Jetset for 2K by Gingham.

One shirt in particular was this design by Experimental Jetset.

Emily Gosling writes:

One of the world’s most famous band T-shirts isn’t actually a band T-shirt at all. That ubiquitous Helvetica-based Beatles design is, according to its creators, just “a shirt with four random names on it”.

Dutch design studio Experimental Jetset says this with a knowing wink: after all, if you slap ‘John & Paul &Ringo & George’ (in that order), you know exactly which John, Paul, Ringo and George people are likely to be reminded of. Of course, it is sort of about The Beatles, but it’s also “a bit of an iconoclastic gesture as something that goes against images, against representations”, says the studio. 

While this shirt has vanished from my collection, the idea behind it has never left me. I realized the other day that it had been 25 years since its original release.

To commemorate this passing of time, I created the sticker below as a tribute to this design and my Mount Rushmore of designers: Paul Rand, Ivan Chermayeff, Saul Bass & Milton Glaser.

This wasn’t an attempt to recreate the original.

It's simply a thank you to a piece of work that quietly shaped the way I think about design.

A remix of legends. 25 years later.

That's one of my favorite things about creative work.

Musicians cover the songs that shaped them. Directors leave subtle nods to the films they love. Designers do the same thing. We participate in an ongoing conversation with the people whose work changed the way we think.

The important part is that we aren't borrowing aesthetics. We're borrowing principles.

The best creative work doesn't just teach you what to make. It changes the way you see.

Over time, those influences stop looking like references and start becoming your own point of view.

Every designer has a family tree.

This sticker is simply a thank you to one of the branches on mine.