Power
of the
Pens

Joshua Berger is a founder and principal of PLAZM (www.plazm.com). His company publishes Plazm magazine, and is a design firm serving commercial clients and social causes. Berger has been recognized by many design publications and award shows including the AIGA Annual Show and the Art Directors Club. He also had an honorary exhibition at ZGRAF in Zagreb, Croatia.

Joshua’s most recent projects include the art direction and design of ESPN: Ultimate Highlight Reel, the relaunch of Adobe magazine and approximately two dozen theater posters.

Berger’s clients, many with Plazm, have included Nike, Lucasfilm, MTV, Jantzen Swimwear, Wieden+Kennedy, J. Walter Thompson, TBWA/Chiat Day and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, among others. PLAZM has been listed by ID magazine as one of the 40 most influential firms in the world, and has received the Creative Resistance Award from Adbusters. The complete catalog of Plazm magazine resides in the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Clearly Joshua is a busy guy and we’re lucky to have him working on this project. It would appear that anything Joshua touches turns to gold. We have no doubt that whatever he brings to the Power of the Pens, it will be equally priceless.

I am a total newbie to Wacom. The first time I used the pen was for this project.

My process is normally pretty organic. The straightforward part is that it always starts with a brief, then pen and paper. There’s something immediate about writing in my notebook which allows me to think more intuitively and conceptually than i do while sitting in front of the computer. That’s actually one of the things that is interesting to me about the Wacom as a tool. I haven’t spent enough time with it to know if i can really conceptualize that way or not, but it is certainly cool for execution and makes painting things a lot easier.

The brief for this project was to create something typographic in relation to the month of September.

I wanted to create something that allowed for rumination about 9/11 without any political messages. After nearly seven years, 9/11 still consumes a great amount of the public consciousness in America. It is invoked daily by politicians to drive public opinion one way or another. The invocations only seem to increase in September. I’m sure 2008, a month before the presidential elections, will be no different. For me, repeating these numbers allows one to think about the event and its meaning - and it has to do with the ceaseless exploitation of the event.

Technically, I enjoyed using the Wacom. It does make working on the computer closer to that feeling of drawing. But it also takes some getting used to - I was dragging some of the numbers around and the layering in my art really happened by accident - mostly because of my clumsiness with the pen. But that’s cool. Accidents often end up yielding the most interesting results.