DESCRIPTION Michael Joseph Croxton Graduation Posters CLIENT Michael Joseph Croxton DESIGN CREDITS Michael Joseph Croxton and Brayden Iwasaki PRINT CREDITS Brayden Iwasaki TYPE CREDITS Trade Gothic Bold Cond. No.20, Cond. No.18

QUANTITY PRODUCED 64 (32 of each) PRODUCTION COST $200 PRODUCTION TIME 1 week DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH 11 in × 17 in PRINT METHOD Letterpress PAPER STOCK 100# Mohawk Super Fine NUMBER OF COLORS 2 spot inks

As a recent graduate from the University of Utah, enterprising young designer Michael Joseph Croxton decided that what he really needed to celebrate the occasion was a limited edition poster. And not just one poster, but two. It helps to have friends in high places, or at least in print shops. Michael explains:

I collect show posters and love the print making process, so I thought a poster that could be treated as an art print would be a great solution. I have a good friend who does letterpress printing and talked him into printing for me. I really wanted to embrace the quirks of the printing process and break some of its rules i.e. using large fields of color, double hits of the same color to make a different one, and reversing type out of blocks of color.

I chose to use some vintage engravings because it spoke to the history of printing, but also because the images could be related to the idea of graduating and moving forward in life. The fish breaking away from the school, and the bird spreading its wings.

The lino block that was used for the background field ended up being warped and would not print evenly, which I ended up really liking. It gave the poster a lot of texture and a nice etherial quality. The background and the actual image are printed with the same color, thus saving us from the need to clean the press. Since the background is such s large field and doesn’t take the ink evenly when the bird and fish images were printed they came in clean and relatively opaque.