There aren't a lot of meetings at Studio Number One. After a conference call with Douglas, Fairey and his designers separated and started working up their own ideas. Some of these generally get tossed, and others might be mixed together into hybrids, but for the first stage the client usually gets a lot of options because having visuals to react to can be a lot more productive than buzzword chatter. With the Sunkist project, there were a lot of guidelines--the type style of Sunkist would not change, its familiar orange-and-blue combo would dominate, etc.--meaning a narrower range of variations was possible. After a week or so, Studio Number One sent its four top picks to Douglas via a secure website and in physical examples.
The biggest pitfall on a project like this, Fairey believes, is ending up with a look that seems forced, insincere, made by outsiders. "You have to be familiar with the graphic language that the people you're trying to reach will respond to," he says. One common mistake in attempting a graffitilike feel, for example, "is to grab a typeface from the computer that's supposed to look like graffiti. But the thing about graffiti is that all the letter forms are based on how they look next to each other. Your a might slant one way or curlicue over this way if it's next to one letter as opposed to another. So it's impossible to create a typeface, and those computer typefaces always look really awkward."
Studio Number One designer Florencio Zavala--he started out as an intern at BLK/MRKT and is also an artist whose work has an urban folk-art feel--hand-scrawled the word Charged in a graffiti-ish flourish. This had the right look and became the centerpiece of a design with a silhouetted cityscape and a series of icons suggesting some of the contest categories. This was one of the treatments Douglas liked best; he asked for some tweaks, then took the results to his clients, who signed off on it.
Asked about his own take on the submitted designs, Fairey sounds almost ambivalent. Brand Buzz had sent over some sample, starting-point designs, but those "looked really flat, didn't have any pop, any zing. It looked like outsiders trying to create stuff for that culture." While the designs Studio One submitted were all things that he and his staff basically felt looked pretty cool, given the constraints, Fairey didn't have a clear favorite and was more than willing to go with whatever made the client happy. "I mean, the stuff that we did is pretty boring compared with other stuff that we do. But it's all relative."
Fairey says he's a capitalism-embracing entrepreneur.
Most of the time, the question of what makes a visual style seem right is hard to pin down. For Express, one of Fairey's designs featured a striking eagle, wings wide, clutching a ribbon with the nonsense phrase "E Pluribus Denim" in blocky letters. "I knew Express was gonna pick that one," he says. "The company seems to want to appeal to Americana, but in a way that also works with people who might have eagle tattoos--bikers and stuff like that. I tried to make it something that was a balance of those things."
Justin McCormack, the marketing consultant, says that he knew he was getting access to an artist with "rock-star status" in the scene he was targeting, but he wasn't sure he was getting someone who was particularly professional. But clients describe Fairey and his team as fast, deadline-sensitive, and responsive. "Basically," McCormack says, "he treats everything like art." At first this surprised him, but looking back, he figures it makes sense when he thinks about the street-art style that made Fairey notorious. "What he was doing was creating propaganda. From there," he chuckles, "it's not such a leap to creating advertising."
When Fairey was a member of the 13-to-18 demographic, he lived in Charleston, S.C., where his obsessions were skateboarding and punk. He chose to go to the Rhode Island School of Design because he had a vague idea that he could make a living in a visual field. He got interested in screen printing. "What happened at RISD was that immediately people were talking about 'What's your major gonna be?' And people that were going into painting thought they were superior to people that were going into illustration, because"--he adopts a fey art-snob voice-- "'Illustration is commercial. I'm not compromising for anyone."
Fairey majored in illustration. He believed, he says, that his fellow students who had chosen to be painters were already compromising their work and were likely to do so even more as they moved into the world of fine-art galleries. He also admits that he was "scared" of the fine-art world. "I did blow it off. Because...," he pauses for a long moment, "honestly, I didn't think that I had the talent to make it in that world."
One night in 1989, when Fairey was still at RISD, he had a friend over who wanted to learn how to make stencils. Fairey flipped through a newspaper and picked out a picture of Andre Roussimoff--or Andre the Giant, the (now deceased) professional wrestler best known for his role in The Princess Bride. The friend balked because the image was too "stupid." Fairey was intrigued. No, he countered, it's cool. It's cutting edge. "Andre the Giant," he told his friend, "has a posse." They proceeded.
Next to the smeary image of the wrestler's face, Fairey scrawled "Andre the Giant Has a Posse." He took the results to Kinko's and made stickers and slapped them on stop signs and in clubs. Then--randomly, in places like his local grocery store--he started hearing people talk about the stickers, asking each other what it might mean. So he put up more of the images, in New York City and Boston. He encouraged others to join in, with stickers, spray-paint stencils, and wheat-pasted posters. Later he shifted away from the longer tag line to the concise "Obey Giant," and started making visual variations, reworking the face in Russian constructivist styles and working it into different graphic contexts. Strictly speaking, what Fairey was doing and encouraging was illegal. Yet it was subversive to no obvious end. It was a kind of self-reflexive enterprise: The point of putting up a lot of Obey images was to see how many Obey images could be put up.
