Artist Spotlight: Josh Finklea

I found Josh Finklea's work through Design Work Life and I'm really impressed with his ability to design for print using lots of text. It's so hard to make tons of text actually look good on a page without being crowded, and Josh Finklea does it quite well. Some of his projects are a little bit out there philosophically and artistically, but his design skills are very good and I appreciate his work.

Here's a poster he did highlighting 65 historic moments from Paley Center's broadcast history. I love the black and white photos, the way the text is arranged, and the use of yellow.

I think this poster has just the right balance of fun and order. The pictures are different sizes and arranged on a loose, somewhat random grid, and the text below is organized really well in straight lines. Having all the images in black and white also provides consistency that balances well with the different picture sizes and placements.

His identity manual for Alaska Air is also really good. I like the cutout on the front and I really like the way the text is laid out in columns and there's plenty of breathing room around the graphics.

I love that white space is part of this design. White space does so much to help the design pull together and give the eyes a place to rest in the midst of the colors and words.

I love these posters for the LA Times Festival of Books. It has a newspaper look to it, it effectively arranges a ton of text, and it's creative—look at the way some of the text slants. How cool!

I also think it's cool how these posters can stand on their own or together as a set of three (as in the first picture). The type is good, too—it looks like some version of Garamond to me.

This Great American Writers booklet similar styled piece: neutral colors and plenty of type. I love how the focus stays on the type and how the design is clean and simple. And the text on the inside pages is arranged really well and isn't overwhelming.

I really like how the text just covers part of the page. My tendency would be to cover the whole page with type, but that would probably be really overstimulating. This layout gets the job done but is much easier to read because of the narrow columns and white space.

So that's that. What do you think of Josh Finklea's print design? Do you have a favorite of his projects that I posted?

link: josh finklea