Dave Plunkert
The recent gallery opening for Unfinished Business was a great success, thanks to the dedicated staff at The New York Times. I had a chance to share some drawings with the crowd, and meet a lot of fellow art directors and illustrators.The show will be up through December, 2009.
Here is a small sampling of the 70+ drawings handed out at the show.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS: David Plunkert & The Posters of Spur opens in New York. Please join us for the opening reception.
RSVP is required for this event to: galleryseven@nytimes.com
DATE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2009
TIME: 7:00pm - 9:00pm
LOCATION: Gallery 7 at the New York Times
ADDRESS: 620 8th Avenue, 7th floor, New York, NY
With an emphasis on concept and form, Spur Design’s David Plunkert has
produced screen-printed, letterpress, and offset posters that strive to
delight, provoke, and persuade. On exhibit are dozens of posters
created for charities, theatre productions, and independent films.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
David Plunkert & the Posters of Spur
by Joyce Hesselberth
Our studio is basically a big concrete box, which is both good and bad. On the good side: it leaves us lots of room for projects and collections and gallery shows and riding tricycles around in circles.
So take a look at our new exterior. With the bright, new color scheme, there's no way to miss us now. I love the security bars that Dave designed.
The entrance has a new facade: diamond-plated steel with lots of good rust, just the way we like it. Both the security bars and the facade were assembled and welded by Mike's Welding.We are happy to announce the launch of our new websites:
spurdesign.com
davidplunkert.com
joycehesselberth.com
All three websites share the same easy navigation and layout and we hope they will give our clients easier access to our updated portfolios. Stop by and take a look, and feel free to email us and let us know what you think!
American Illustration is arguabley one of the most sought after Illustration awards in our industry. Dave Plunkert has been included in the book for 17 consecutive years. This year, his winning entries are from the Theatre Project poster series, Le Cabaret De Carmen and Cyclopedia.
Joyce Hesselberth had two pieces selected for American Illustration's online gallery. The first, for The Chronicle Review's article disputing the Mars/Venus myth. The second, a cover for The Santa Fe Reporter about genetically modified chile peppers.
You can view both the PRINT and WEB winners online at the American Illustration website.
By Joyce Hesselberth
We've been giving our website a big overhaul, something we do every few years.
Spur Design has had a website since 1997, almost as long as we've had a company. I programmed the very first one in HTML using a text-editing program. Website design was new and shiny. We decided we wanted to make ours more tactile. We worked with scraps of paper, drawn lines and vintage fonts.
In 2001, we shifted gears and reorganized the site. We divided things more simply into Design and Illustration. The intro page was clean and dark blue, with animated orange arrows.
2002, and we moved to browns and ochre and back to a retro collage. The grumpy guy is my dad. Fortunately, in real life he has a sense of humor.
2005, we combined grumpy guy with bright CMYK colors. It was mostly a reference to the print process, but reminded us of Bradbury Thompson, one of design's greats.
And here is where we are now. The opening features a simple animation with buttons below.
Followed by pages with our portfolios. It has served us well for a couple years now, and it's time to move forward.
So where do we go from here? The new website will incorporate a lot of what we have learned in the past, but with a clean, spare Flash-based presentation. We will be announcing its launch soon, so stay tuned.
One of our blogs, Kid Baltimore, has just been nominated for the Nickelodeon Parents' Pick award for best local blog in Baltimore. Kid Baltimore is designed and maintained by Spur Design and focuses on kid-friendly activities around Baltimore, MD. To help support our blog, you can vote daily until July 15th.
David Plunkert's poster for Dungeon Masters, a film directed by Kevin McAlester, recently took home the best poster award at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The poster was reproduced both digitally and as an oversized, three-color, 25 x 39" screenprint.
Illustrator Marc Burckhardt and David Plunkert received gold medals for illustration and art direction, respectively from the Society of Illustrators in New York. The Directory of Illustration 26 brochure cover, with Burckhardt's amazing oil painting, illustrated the concept "put you best face forward."
