Mixing Messages | Essay | Identity


`INTRO THE STREET TYPOGRAPHY The Familiar The Modern IDENTITY Corporate Culture Subcultures Design Cultures PUBLISHING The Book The Magazine Electronic Publishing` `INTERVIEWS`

The languages of identity, applied to products, packaging, publishing, and fashion often mix visual elements from different sources.

Independent Project Press, located in Sedona, Arizona, was established by Bruce Licher in 1984 to produce packaging and graphics for his own band, Savage Republic.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new genre of music ephemera was spawned by "raves," large dance parties staged at remote industrial sites.

For his unsigned New York band Lotion, Tony Zajkowski converted a series of national brand names into logos for his own group, pasting them on walls and construction fences in 1991.

Artist Tom McGlynn revised and reassembled well-known corporate identities to reveal new messages that are contained, like puzzles, within the original.

Brand images--invented and borrowed--are an important feature of the subcultures revolving around skateboarding and snow-boarding.

The products and graphics of snowboarding lean heavily on the language of the skateboard scene.

ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was founded in New York in March 1987.

WAC, the Women's Action Coalition, was founded in New York in 1992 in response to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Congressional hearings on sexual harrassment.