OUGD505 / STUDIO BRIEF 02 / SHEPARD FAIREY

Shepard Fairey is known as the founder of OBEY clothing from the skateboarding scene, with his first iconic piece being 'Andre the Giant has a posse' sticker campaign:

Distributed by the skateboarding community, this was a street campaign which in Fairey's words was an 'experiment in phenomenology', it was essentially an in-joke directed at the hip hop subculture, which was then illicitly distributed around Rhode Island and the Eastern US.

"The Andre The Giant sticker was just a spontaneous, happy accident. I was teaching a friend how to make stencils in the summer of 1989, and I looked for a picture to use in the newspaper, and there just happened to be an ad for wrestling with Andre The Giant and I told him that he should make a stencil of it. He said 'Nah, I’m not making a stencil of that, that’s stupid!' but I thought it was funny so I made the stencil and I made a few stickers and the group of guys I was hanging out with always called each other The Posse, so it said Andre The Giant Has A Posse, and it was sort of appropriated from hip-hop slang" Shepard Fairey, Format magazine 2008.

By the 1990s, the design was photocopied and screen printed, placed throughout the world in highly visable places.

This method managed to bring about more and more publicity for the campaign, and gave it certain semantics with the audience. It then became stylised and used as the logo for OBEY. This has created a certain character about the brand, with the bold vector shapes and impactful composition with implementation of red.


Another famous piece by Shepard Fairey is the Barack Obama "hope" poster:

The poster contains the portrait of Barack Obama, becoming most popular during the time of the 2008 presidential election, as it was used for Obama's campaign. The poster is a stylised image of Obama with alternative type such as "Hope" "Change" or "Progress". The main colours are navy, blue, red and beige, softly representing the colours of the American flag and reinforcing a sense of patriotism that America is so famous for. 

A 2010 study from Brandeis University reported that the typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class and that black wealth was largely stagnant from 1984 to 2007.The design was created in one day and printed first as a poster. Fairey sold 290 of the posters on the street immediately after printing them. It was then more widely distributed—both as a digital image and other paraphernalia—during the 2008 election season, initially independently but with the approval of the official Obama campaign.

Posters were screen printed, 350 were sold and 350 put up initially. He used the funds generated from selling the design to creating more; 4,000 more were produced and distributed at Obama rallies. There was also a printable digital version on his website. However as Fairey has said in interviews, the biggest method of distribution was social media and word of mouth.

"By October 2008, Fairey and Sergant claimed to have printed 300,000 posters (with less than 2,000 sold and the rest given away or displayed) and 1,000,000 stickers, as well as clothing and other items with the image sold through Fairey's website, in addition to copies printed by others." source

The aftermath of the poster campaign was many imitations and parodies, including the implementation of Gaddafi, and the text replaced with "HOPELESS", which was used by many anti-gaddafi protesters.