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Say farewell and adieu to your money, because the reissue of John Williams’ Jaws soundtrack on 2xLP vinyl was just the start of Mondo’s Jaws 45th anniversary celebration.
The company also dropped a Jaws shirt designed by Ryan Duggan ($25), a Jaws 2 shirt featuring Lou Feck's artwork ($25), and an enamel pin set designed by Oliver Barrett based on the film’s iconic poster($15; pictured below).
ART BLANCHE: Maps & Atlases
The guys in Maps & Atlases have both lived with and played in bands with illustrator Ryan Duggan, so when they needed artwork for their record, they didn’t have to look very far for a solution.
“They’re old friends,” Ryan explained. “Almost all of them have moved at this point -- I think 3/4 of them live in LA now -- [but] for the longest time that was my most regular client because we were good friends and they just used me for everything.”
Maps & Atlases – Beware and Be Grateful (Courtesy of Ryan Duggan)
And by “everything” he really does mean everything. Once he started working with Maps & Atlases, Ryan was responsible for pretty much all of the art that the band needed.
“It was a few years there where I was doing the poster for every show that they had here in Chicago and I did almost all their album artwork. It’s cool to look back on it because 90% of their visual output was something that I did.”
Maps & Atlases show poster (Courtesy of Ryan Duggan)
One benefit of this arrangement was that it opened Ryan up to some new creative experiences and opportunities. While he primarily works with screen-printed posters, Maps & Atlases had a variety of artwork-related needs, including a cover for their EP.
Recognizing that the album artwork required a different approach than his poster work, Ryan took it upon himself to leave out some of the trademark aspects of his screen-printed work, preferring to leave a more subtle fingerprint in his work on the record covers.
“With a lot of their album artwork stuff, I tried to distance my hand from it a little bit,” he added. “So a lot of those album artworks are made of weird found imagery and some sort of collage-style stuff. [There were] a lot of funny little illustrations from old books that I scanned in high res and blew up and did some color stuff and what not. That was a cool one. And then they did the etching on the back side -- that was just a script piece that I drew that was the name of the record.”
Maps & Atlases – You and Me and the Mountain (Courtesy of Ryan Duggan)
“It’s definitely a different process because I think that posters you can kind of be fast and loose with, and you can go aesthetically places where you normally wouldn’t go. An album cover… to me I think of an album cover is a very permanent thing. It sort of has to represent that record exactly -- every time people listen to that record they’re going to see that thing,” he explained. “I try to make it something that has a little bit less of my hand in it and a little bit more what I think that record should look like.”
-Dylan Singleton
P.S. Maps & Atlases’ drummer, Chris Hainey, is behind an album cover or two as well.
ART BLANCHE: Ryan Duggan
A degree in advertising and copywriting as well as a career in design has led Ryan Duggan to this common scene: Ryan, seated in his booth at any of the usual art fairs, is ready to sell some prints when a potential customer walks in. The customer comes over to Ryan, introduces himself, and exclaims, “You’re the sh*tting dog guy!”
It’s a legacy -- Ryan will freely admit -- that’s his own doing.
“Last year I was doing a series that was all these picturesque outdoor scenes, but somewhere in the image there’s a dog taking a sh*t,” Ryan explained, laughing. “…So that’s a bed I’ve made for myself.”
(Courtesy of OMG Posters)
The idea behind the project, he explained, was to “[make] this beautiful image and then [ruin] it.” He ended up making 12 of the images, one for each month that year.
“[Now,] if you google ‘Ryan Duggan sh*tting dogs’ something will come up,” he added, laughing again.
This unconventional series perfectly captures Ryan’s humorous approach to his work; a mindset that holds true for the majority of his catalog, including his personal projects (like the defecating dog designs) as well as most commissioned assignments.
Aside from his infamous poopy pooch pictures, Ryan has built a successful career creating screen-printed concert posters for a variety of local and national acts.
His foray into screen-printing started in high school, where he learned how to print onto t-shirts. While this interest fell off during college, Ryan revisited screen-printing after graduating “because a bunch of [his] friends were in bands and [he] was in bands, [and his] friends started approaching [him] to draw posters for shows and [he] started doing that.”
“They were using other people to print them and I thought that, ‘Oh I used to know how to do this, I could probably figure it out again.’ And then I got back into screen printing at that point,” he said.
(Courtesy of Ryan Duggan)
For about six years after college, Ryan worked full-time at a design firm that specialized in publication design. During the night and on weekends, he used his free time to continue doing his freelance poster work. Roughly three and a half years ago, he decided to quit his job to go freelance full-time.
For Ryan, one of the most exciting parts of concert posters is the creative freedom they provide. Most clients, he explained, know what sort of image they’re getting when they approach Ryan for a poster, which means there are less restrictions on what they want from him. Simply put, concert posters let Ryan get a little “weird” with his work.
That said, he prefers to keep his posters aesthetically simple, preferring to let the wit of the image be the focus of attention.
“There’s a lot of poster artists…[who are] these incredible illustrators that just spend hours and hours and hours and hours on a drawing and that’s never been my approach. I always come up with an idea first,” he said. “I can draw, I can illustrate, but I don’t spend those 20 hours at a desk [to] make an some unbelievable illustration, I’d rather have something that communicates a humorous little message and then have the image be simple.”
“I tend to pare down my images… three colors or four colors at most, whereas a lot of other guys do like 10 colors on a poster. It’s rare that I do that especially in concert posters. [Whereas] I’ve been making art prints more in the last 4 years so I’ve gotten a little more fancy with some of that stuff. In general, I like to have a stripped down appearance and have it be funny.”
(Courtesy of Ryan Duggan)
Additionally, Ryan prefers to avoid using digital technology as much as possible when working – a notable feat in this day and age.
“Pretty much everything is screen printed unless it’s something where I’m just providing a digital file, but in general though my whole aesthetic is all hand drawn, so pretty much everything starts out the old fashioned way,” he said. “If it’s going to be a concert poster, I usually don’t use the computer at all because I make my own films by hand. It was something that was a necessity at first because I didn’t have access to a printer that I could print films on -- so it started off as a necessity and then over time sort’ve became my style. I still do a lot of this stuff by hand with regard to the screen-printing process. Most all of it is printed by hand as well.”
“Whenever I can I like to do the whole thing by hand -- you have to see it in your head as you’re working along because I’m pretty much only working in black because I’ll make each film in black and then I have to in my head think about what it will look like when it’s done.”
(Courtesy of Ryan Duggan)
Recently, Ryan has been interested in studying vintage gag gifts for inspiration. Their appeal to his humorous side is clear, but he’s also found a deep, visual intrigue in them as well.
“Honestly, these days my inspiration is old product design and old advertising and stuff like that. I spend a lot of time on eBay just looking at old novelty gifts, old gag gifts, that kind of sh*t. Like all the old Franco-American hilarious stupid dirty joke things -- the packaging is always amazing; it’s always hilarious and really nicely illustrated. I tend to look at a lot of stuff like that from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and I keep little inspiration folders on my computer of all of these funny little images.”
Looking back through his career, Ryan can point out different phases that he’s gone through with his art. For a few years, it was a lot of “animals doing something they wouldn’t normally be doing,” followed by a period of very typography-heavy designs. For a while, he only used primary colors. Even though he’s branched out with his color palette, there’s still a certain shade of red that his wife (who is also a screen printer) is constantly pointing out that he uses.
No matter the era, though, Ryan explained, “the one thing that carries across all my stuff is humor.”
Crapping canines included.
-Dylan Singleton
Ryan Duggan's Treasury of Shitting Dogs work is so great. Obsessed.
ViA
Ryan Duggan
Ryan Duggan
