2014's Jamie Reid

Jamie Reid, an English designer whom did artworks and was a designer for a band called The Sex Pistols. After his fame throughout the artworks done in the past decades for the sex pistols where he produced album covers and posters in the punk era and together with other poster designs on anti-political issues, modern society’s social problems and crisis he didn't stop there. July 2014 and Jamie showed up in an exhibition called ‘Ragged Kingdom’ with a series of posters he re-done from his originals.

One of his main works was ‘Shoplifters welcome’. The artist here have intended to do a poster on today’s daylight legal robberies or in a so called better way financial problems which are controlled in the famous capitalist street – Wall Street. He managed to display it on the logo which is on the passport as if you look closely; you see the words ‘easy money’.

As you can see on the first glance you’ll notice that Reid here used his the traditional way of using colours as he used back in punk art. He used vibrant ones; orange, pink together with a bold black background to make the subject centre of attention (where he used the vibrant colours to compose the subject). Another traditional technique he used here in this poster; is the fluorescent coloured newspaper pieces cut outs, yet this time he used a more vibrant pink than he used back in the days and interestingly enough the ‘newspaper’ typo have been changed into an order. All letters are all sans-serif font with the same height and length (one typeface) as before all letters used to be different as in separate letters from different pages in magz and newspapers.

What he did here, Reid has used another traditional technique that he once used in the 70’s; ‘stencil effect’. He used it back then in one of his artworks the ‘nowhere busses’ **, yet in today’s artwork he gives an extra interesting look as he uses 3 different coloured layers to give extra detail. This time his main subject (hand and brief case) are illustrated whereas in his originals he generally re-used printed media and attach it to his poster. One would ask why I did the stencil effect in inverted commas, this is because back then Reid might have photocopied a printed bus with high amount of exposure and automatically black and grey prints will become black and white. 

Another thing that has caught my eye as a whole poster is its texture, where the paper looks as if it’s crumpled. Jamie here might have wanted to spread a message but in a subliminal way as if he’s representing re-cycling/re-using unwanted papers, which in a way is another technique he used in his old days as he re-cycled / re-used printed letters from newspapers and magazines. 

 ** - Picture for reference