The Type Directors Club kicks off the holidays with food, drinks and music! We celebrate the season with the first all-type Swissted poster exhibition—and designer Mike Joyce will be on hand to chat about type, music, and Swiss Modernism.

Swissted is an ongoing project by graphic designer Mike Joyce. Drawing from his love of punk rock and Swiss Modernism, two movements that have almost nothing to do with one another, Mike has redesigned vintage punk, hardcore, new wave, and indie rock show flyers into hundreds of International Typographic Style posters. Each design is set in lowercase Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk medium. Every single one of these amazing shows actually happened.

The Swissted website was launched in January of 2012 and has since amassed over one million visits, spawning editorial features, international exhibitions, and a 200-page oversized art book published by Quirk Books. Two Ziggy Stardust designs from the Swissted collection were selected by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image to be offered as limited edition prints coinciding with the sold-out David Bowie Is exhibition. In 2015 six Swissted posters were chosen for Swiss Style, an exhibition at the Museum of Design, Zürich and are now archived in its permanant collection.

Mike Joyce is the founder of Stereotype Design in New York City, a studio specializing in wide-ranging projects for the entertainment industry. He has designed album packaging for established artists including Iggy Pop, Katy Perry, The Cars, Fall Out Boy, The Replacements, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Natalie Merchant, The Lemonheads, Willie Nelson, Morphine, Heart, Miles Davis, and Aretha Franklin. Mike’s work has been featured in over 130 publications including Print, Communication Arts, Eye, Graphic, Coupe, Computer Arts, Rolling Stone, How, Inked, NME, New York magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2000 Mike was selected for Print magazine’s exclusive New Visual Artists annual issue, showcasing twenty emerging designers under the age of 30. His work has been shown in exhibitions by the AIGA, the Type Directors Club, the One Club, the Art Directors Club’s first Young Guns show, and selected for the Permanent Collection of the Library of Congress. Mike’s solo and group exhibitions have opened at home and abroad, including Upstate New York, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Belgium, Estonia, Moscow, Zürich, and South Korea. He has served as a judge for advertising, design, and interaction award shows for the Art Directors Club, the Type Directors Club, the Alex Steinweiss Awards, and co-chaired Young Guns 4. Mike taught at the School of Visual Arts for seven years. He lives and works in the West Village of New York City and refuses to design wedding invitations.

“Punk rock and typography are my two favorite things. I grew up completely inspired by punk and would later find that same inspiration in Swiss graphic design—more specifically the International Typographic Style. I always liked that these two art forms seemed at odds with one another in that punk has an anti-establishment ethos and Swiss modernism is very structured. And at the same time there’s a common thread between the two—the Swiss modernists purged extraneous decoration to create clear communication, while punk rock took on self-indulgent rock and roll and stripped it to its core. So I thought it would be an interesting study to combine the two and see what happens.”

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