Jim Godfrey

Jim Godfrey started his career as an art director in Salt Lake City, doing work for clients like Marker, Easton and Sun Valley. He moved to Montana in the mid-1990s to work as a creative director. After creating work for Yellowstone National Park, KOA, and Travel Montana, he returned to Utah and earned his MFA from Utah State University. He began teaching graphic design at Utah Valley University in 2002. He has an acute interest in typography--to be honest, he’s a type nerd. This shows in his most recent works, which are typographically driven. He mines popular culture for inspiration for the content of his work while typographic designs from the 19th and 20th centuries serve as a foundation on which to explore. This intersection between popular culture and typography yield refined, yet playful explorations which are inspired by the past, but stand firmly in the 21st century. His work has received numerous awards from FPO (For Print Only), the Print Regional Design Annual, the Addy awards, and the Telly awards. He’s also written for How magazine (back when magazines were a thing) and his work is featured in the book Build Your Own Brand by Robin Landa (fwMedia, 2013).

This poster is an homage to two loves of mine: music and mixing typefaces. The poster, styled after 1980s design motifs, is a mashup of popular song titles from the 1980s set in typefaces that complement each other. 

In the early 1980s, cassette tapes reigned supreme. It became the main media on which music albums were released. Sony helped ensure its adoption by the average music fan when it created the Walkman, the world’s first personal music device. Pop in a cassette and music followed the owner wherever they went. Cassette tape recorders had been around since the 1970s, but innovations in the 1980s included a dual cassette tape player that allowed the user to replicate a high fidelity recording to a blank cassette, making it practically indistinguishable to the original. This provided the perfect vehicle to create a mix tape. To share favorite songs with another person, music lovers would take a blank tape and record on it one song at a time in real time, meaning 30 minutes of music took 30 minutes to record. It was a great way to hear new music, especially things that were not played on the radio. It also became a great way to connect with a friend or impress someone you hoped would fall in love not only with your music, but with you. 

To design this piece, I scoured through hundreds of designs from the 1980s that I found in design annuals and in the design archives of aiga.org. Fortunately, I also attended jr. high, high school and college during the 1980s. Hopefully, viewers will appreciate the creative treatment and mix of typefaces as well as being entertained by the combination of disparate song titles. The poster is printed digitally on Hammermill’s Spring Hill Pink #80 paper.