Don’t get cute Internet,

I was contacted out of the blue to make this poster for a top secret Elvis Costello performance at Washington Hall a few weeks ago. It needed to be turned around in like 4 days and I was already dealing with a full plate of work so I only had one day to start and finish the design, given that I think it turned out pretty alright.

On top of it being a top secret private show, Elvis brought his Fabulous Spinning Songbook!

I already had a handful of jobs in the queue D&L at the time so I needed another printer in town to take the job on wicked short notice and Broken Press came through!

It’s a three color print including metallic gold, signed and numbered edition of 300 BUT only 50 available. 250 went to the show. Now available at Nakatomi.

And a few days later these big ass two part Fitz & The Tantrums posters were due for sold out shows at the Showbox!

The design is a cityscape in two parts, each can stand on their own but together complete the whole night and day concept. I borrowed the color scheme from the album design and tried to build a cool vibe with subtle nods in the scenery to classic Los Angeles. Case in point, the Rosslyn Hotel. I had thought of a Bonnie and Clyde style design based more around Fitz and Noelle, which is where the car on the Friday poster came from.

Both prints together, completing the fantastical cityscape.

Both prints are available at Nakatomi now. Only 70 or so left from a signed and numbered edition of 130. 3 colors, printed at D&L.

Behold! Two brand new posters for two huge shows here in the Jet City, South Alaska, Seattletown! I was recently commissioned by the fine folks at AEG Live to reach my tiny hand into my hat and produce a couple rabbits(poster designs) for Deck The Hall Ball and Winter Warmth.

Deck The Hall Ball this year features Mumford and Sons, Death Cab For Cutie and Foster The People amongst others. I went to Deck The Hall Ball in High School one year, it was like 311, Staind(Haaaaa!!), Filter, Foo Fighters, Beck and BUSH!!! Holy 90′s Bat Man!!! 

Oh man, I remember Beck had either just released or was about to release Midnight Vultures so he was dropping the slow jams on everyone and Dave Grohl had Krist Novoselic come out for a couple songs during the Foo Fighters set. I think they did Big Me or something. I was really into Filter and 311 at the time…and Bush. So…yeah, I enjoyed it a lot, fuck you I’m not cool. Sorry.

And to further paint the picture of how lame I was in high school, that was the only show that I ever crowd surfed at. Now, crowd surfing is stupid but for kids I highly recommend it. What I mean to say is, I should have gone to a lot more shows as a kid….and as an adult.

Winter Warmth features Florence + Machine, The Head and the Heart and Mat Kearney. Tried to keep it mysterious, something fitting Florence with a winter element in there as well. I think I might make an art print of this down the road to kind of finish what I started.

I done talked enough, internet. Here’s the specifics on the prints: they’re both 18″x24″, 3 color including metallic copper. Signed and numbered, edition of 225 but I’ve got a limited quantity of 75 available. Thems is all that’s left, available now at Nakatomi. Make both of our Christmas/Kwanzaa/Festivus/Hanukkah’s happy and get one!!

NEW POSTER! MARC MARON! FIRST EVER BIG ASS SOLD OUT THEATER SHOW!! 2 COLOR, 18″x24″, S/N EDITION OF 100 at NAKATOMI NOW!!!

This was a great show, the Neptune is a great venue, Mike Drucker the opener was very good, hats off to STG, all that good shit but here’s the thing: when Marc comes out he’s holding this poster with his notes and stuff. My buddy Jordan starts getting excited for me like he’s my grandma or something(I assume, my grandparents died at an early age) but I get nervous because I don’t know where this is going. Could be good, could be a Sinead O’Connor situation right? So he holds the poster up and talks about it and explains for those who aren’t poster nerds that it’s the classic Lenny Bruce Fillmore poster(arguably the most iconic comedy poster ever made) tweaked for that evenings show. He said he liked it but his reaction to his face in place of Lenny Bruce was if I remember correctly, “How the fuck am I supposed to live up to that?!”  then he tossed it and it sat on stage for the whole show, luckily the head of the guy sitting in front of me was blocking it from my view otherwise it would have been weird for me.

I chose this art direction because Marc references Lenny Bruce a lot in his podcast when talking shop with stand ups and I know he’s a Grateful Dead fan and into a lot of the music and pop culture of the the 60′s that emanated from the Bay area. I figured he would like it and it would fuck with his head a little, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! I met him real quick after the show, told him I made the poster, he said it was cool, shook hands, good times.

This is why I make posters, for stuff/people/bands that I love. I love Marc Maron, I used to stay up in my room and and watch Late Night with Conan O’Brien in Junior High and High School(with headphones on and a towel under the door to block the light from the TV) and I caught Marc on there a million times and tried to keep up with him as a stand up over the years but like anything you lose touch here and there. Before Marc started his now humongously successful podcast WTF a couple years ago, all I knew was that he’d been on Air America for a couple years and I didn’t have enough frame of reference to ever check it out…and I’m a dummy and can’t get farther than ankle deep into politics.

Once WTF started, all was right with the world…well not really but at least now there’s a funny, honest couple hours of podcast every week with Marc and the funniest and most interesting people on the planet to help us all slog though the world. If you’re reading this you probably already listen to WTF but if you don’t, pull your head out and get over here or just go into the itunes store and search WTF and subscribe, IT’S FREE, GRANDPA! And get Marc’s new album This Has To Be Funny. It is!

My first ever Mystery Tube sale is happening right now!!! Or as I call it “The Jon Smythtery Tube Sale” * Fifty bucks gets you 5 randomly selected posters and or art prints, which is a wicked awesome deal to begin with BUT I have also pulled a small handful of reserve copies of sold out prints out from vault for this sale so if you’re lucky you may end up with Black Keys(Columbus) or Weezer or a sold out Big Lebowski print.

You've got like a 10% chance of getting one but it's your last chance for romance! Buy 10 tubes, beat the system Weezer fan!!!

It’s a mystery tube so you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get(that’s the fun of it) but I made sure that every tube has a print that I have deemed “premium” in it. Like one of the deep sold out reserves I just mentioned or maybe a Mallrats print, maybe one of the new Pulp Fiction prints, you’re guaranteed to get something awesome that’s what I’m saying. To be honest I think I may have gone a little too far in making this mystery tube sale chock full of good stuff but I wanted to make it worthwhile. I’m giving myself a headache trying to explain how great a deal this is, I feel like Jack Roberts.

Go here now, internet. Get you some screen printed gold for pennies on the dollar.

* some of you(like literally 2) might be saying “sometimes you’re funny on the blog, you didn’t even try this time”. This is my reply, say “Jon Smythtery Tube” out loud, it’s funny. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry. It’s like an episode of Louie, there’s one funny part. Take it or leave it.

INTERNET!

I’m kinda busy so I’m gonna keep it short and sweet here. I just made my copies of the It’s Alive poster I did for The Alamo Drafthouse available in my Big Cartel store.

It was a lot of fun to make, the prints turned out nice! 24″ x 36″, 5 color screen print. I only have 30 copies available, all signed and numbered.

Hello, I’m here. I’m waiting……

Here we has my brand new poster for Weezer at The WaMu Theater. It’s a 4 color screen print that includes metallic gold, with a signed and numbered edition of 100 pieces. They are going fast over at the Nakatomi store.

The design is a play on the package and cartridge design of Zelda. There are visual references in the poster from the song In The Garage, which is on the Blue Album…if you’re still reading this I probably didn’t need to explain that. On this tour(I think) and at this show(I know, I was there) Weezer played The Blue Album and Pinkerton in their entirety.

So anyway, the video game/nerdy design angle seemed natural for Weezer in general but moreso since Pinkerton and The Blue Album are the focus here. Pinkerton was the album that hooked me on Weezer, I guess I heard Buddy Holly and Say It Aint So enough on the radio that I liked them plenty but never felt compelled to get the Blue Album…which is weird but it happens with bands that get a lot of radio play…or it did when radio and Mtv were viable entities…in the 90′s, the sweet sweet 90′s….

I just remember listening to Pinkerton and Supergrass’ In It For The Money and playing video games non-stop one summer, I think it was the summer before 9th grade. Rebel Assault II, Warcraft II(I don’t know if Starcraft was out yet), DOOM II and all my old NES and SEGA games. I think I finally beat Dragon Warrior(with the help of Nintendo Power Magazine of course) and goofed around trying to not suck at T&C Surf Designs, is it supposed to be hard or am I retarded? I figured out the skating but the surfing always seemed like chaotic button mashing.

For whatever reason, Pinkerton is one of the only albums I loved in Junior High that still holds up today and it is forever cemented in my head with video games and I figured I can’t be alone so I stuck with my initial instinct on the design.

PS. I know the line in the song is “…I’ve got a 12 sided die” not 20 sided like you see in the poster. I didn’t realize that until I had it in there. I figured it looks good and you still need a 20 sided die in D&D too, right? Don’t you? I never really played D&D but I thought there were like 5 different kinds of die necessary to play. I’m sure I’m wrong. Sue me, I played Magic™ cards asshole!!

PPS, a note from the show, they had a little slideshow between Blue and Pinkerton. Old pictures from the early days, all that good shit but the funny thing to me was a clipping from Rolling Stone. It was a year in review piece about the worst albums of 1997, Pinkerton was #2 worst album just beat out by Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase………I think those were probably the two albums I listened to the most that year. Hurts a little to say that….for some reason I thought they would play Susanne between albums and or as an encore, didn’t happen. Okay that’s it, thank you very much internet.

More Dragon Warrior links right here…..every word is a different link. It’s kinds gross.

BEHOLD, my poster for The Head And The Heart for this years Sasquatch! Festival at the Gorge. This is a late blog post, so I’m going to keep it short and sweet.

The Head And The Heart have taken the Pacific Northwest, if not the world by storm as they’ve signed with Subterranean Pop and probably played more dates than Motörhead this year. It seemed fitting to keep the design of this poster northwest centric, they represent the northwest well and Sasquatch! is one of the biggest festivals in Washington state, annually.

The main design element is a scrapbook of sorts, the main type is a literal interpretation of the song “Rivers and Roads”. The background is an old map of Washington, there are sports cards spilling out the bottom there, including Edgar, Tez and The Man Child….it was either that or a Dick’s wrapper. Them’s are the facts, don’t really have time to pontificate.
It’s a 5 color screen print, edition of only 100 pieces, signed and numbered. Available in my store at Nakatomi.

Wake up Internet, I think I got something to say to you.

As a designer of posters, one of the most common questions I get is “How does it work? Do you talk to the bands or do they talk to you or what?”.

The answer is a little bit of both. When you’re just starting out you have to blindly ask anyone you can think of, and build off of the generous souls who allow you to design anything for them. Be it a band, a club or a label, whatever. Then if you’re lucky, once you get to a point where people have seen your work then you’ll get asked back by previous clients or bands and venues will contact you out of the blue.

It’s like anything else really. If you have any degree of talent and are willing to put in the work, you’ll be fine.

So in the case of this Ke$ha poster, I was asked by the Showbox if I could get a poster done in ten days in time for the show. Not a lot of time considering I have a day job and other projects on my plate and I had no idea if it would fit into the schedule at D&L*. Not to mention I’m not that familiar with Ke$ha’s music, didn’t seem like a great fit. I declined.

In an effort to grease the wheels of production they offered to pay for the art and the printing. It was apparent they really needed this thing to happen and I was happy to help them out now that I was going to make a couple bucks off of the job rather than potentially losing a couple hundred which…happens when you have to foot the bill for printing and don’t sell enough of the posters on your own.

Okay so now I’m in but I still don’t have a lot of time and not a great frame of reference. Luckily Christina from Perfect Laughter was more than helpful throwing in various aesthetic references via twitter. I really wanted to use as many as possible, especially Rodman but I could really only work in one of them BUT the big thing is it helped me get in the proper head space designwise. Big ups to Perfect Laughter or as I say in my head “Perfy Ha Ha”.

The point of all this is, it’s not just about doing posters for your favorite bands. It’s still design work most of the time and I personally like the challenge of creating something for a client(or subject matter) that I don’t know much about at the outset because it’s fun starting from scratch. And in situations like this I’m really trying to please the client rather than myself, which is healthier than building a mountain of weirdness that only I can understand

As far as I’m concerned, this is how poster making should happen. You get asked, you get payed, you do the work(don’t overthink it), please the client. I heard Ke$ha loved the poster and grabbed a ton for herself. Everybody wins!

*See kids, you not only have deadlines to get your design done but screen printing takes time and if you’re not doing it yourself you have to give you’re printer time to squeeze it into the schedule.

This isn’t exactly “the decision” or any kind of revolutionary defection from the status quo, it’s just a man making his life easier whilst servicing his customers efficiently. Outsourcing, if you will.
What am I talking about?? I’m moving my online store to NAKATOMI, which means when you order a print of mine you will receive it in 2-5 days as you should instead of waiting for my dumb ass to have time to tube it up and drag it to the post office which can often take a month to arrive as many of you reading this likely know from experience. That and I often times send the wrong poster(s), all that shit is over now. My posters are in capable hands.

This is the first wave, I will be slowly transitioning the back catalog of posters to Nakatomi and eventually close out my big cartel store and Nakatomi will be the main location to find Jon Smith posters online. So bookmark that shit yo.

Bottomline it’s a win/win, you get what you want when you buy a poster quick and easy and I get more time to spend designing…or catching up on old SEGA games, whatevs!

All posters will still be signed and numbered by me moving forward as per usual unless it’s an art print that gets printed in-house at Nakatomi down the road in which case will just be numbered and not signed. Overall I’d say 80-90% of the time my prints will still be signed by me.

CLOSE UP/DETAIL IMAGE: Built To Spill, Showbox. November, 2010. Seattle, WA.

Aaaaaaand to help kick off the new store I’ve finally got my Built To Spill poster from November available. There are 2 versions of the poster, regular edition of 100 and an edition of 50 with a subtle nod to the memory of a once proud, now deceased sports franchise….championship ghosts….

Also, while moving posters around, organizing and such I found a few more copies of the Black Keys Columbus poster I could spare so a few of those are in the store as well but there are only a few and that’s it forever!!!

Goodnight internet, I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of each other throughout the school year…I uh, peeked at your schedule and went to the office and got myself transferred into  a couple of the classes you’re taking this quarter…

2011 is already awesome, things are gonna change I can feel it. Everything ground to a halt toward the end of 2010 due to having too much shit happening at the same time but it was still a good run, I liked it. A damn site better than 2009 that’s for sure.

Long story short, having a day job and working on overlapping deadlines at night during football season is suicide. I fucked myself on a couple projects, I would go into vivid detail but I’d be here all day.

But anyway that mess was in December and things are snapping back into shape, yknow like in Christine when the car rebuilds itself.

I’m going to Los Angeles on Friday(maybe that’s today depending on when I post this) to attend the opening of “Is This thing On?” a group show at Gallery 1988. Jensen was gracious enough(or drunk enough, zing!) to ask me to design the official poster for the show:

I’ve done a couple prints for 1988 in the past and have one more coming up, I’ve never been down there so I’m really looking forward to it. The other show I speak of is “MULTIPLAYER” the video game themed group show opening January 15th at the new Gallery 1988 location in Venice.

Speaking of which, while I’m in L.A I’m going to get over to Venice and check out some of Jim Morrison’s old haunts. Ha! That’s a joke…..but it’s…true. I’m going to do just that if I can.

Shit! I gotta go, my dad’s giving me a ride to the airport(I let him do it, he loves it…) which means getting there 3 HOURS EARLY.

Oh and speaking of comedy posters, here’s that Doug Stanhope poster I did. Illustration/design by me, concept by Rob Jones:

Alright I gotta hop in the shower. Love you, talk soon! XOXOXO