Burn To Shine (1999)
Design : Mike King, Tom Dolan and JP Plunier - Illustration : Mike King
Live From Mars (2001)
Art direction and design by JP Plunier and Mike King
DVD Pleasure and Pain (2002)
Package art direction and design : Mike King
DVD Live at the Hollywood Bowl (2003)
Package art direction and design : Mike King at Crash Design
Diamonds On The Inside (2003)
Layout and design : Mike King

Interview by Emmanuel Rivet / www.swer.net - September 2003

Mike King...
I am a graphic designer and poster artist from Portland, Oregon. Over the last 20 years I have had the opportunity to work on projects for a wide variety of artists beside Ben Harper, they include : Jack Johnson, Pink Martini, Reverend Horton Heat, The Dandy Warhols, Poison Idea and many others. I basically started as a graphic designer by making flyers for punk rock shows in exchange for free admission, after a while there were more shows to make posters for than I wanted to see, so I started charging money.


Crash Design...
14 years ago I started the design studio, Crash Design. Over the years I have had several partners, for the last 7 years Crash Design has been a one man shop.
| www.crashamerica.com

Voodoo Catbox...
In 1995 Gary Houston and I decided to try to work together on some screenprinted poster, this arrangement was dubbed Voodoo Catbox by Gary and eventually spawned the website voodoocatbox.com which is where the posters he and I make are sold. Originally Gary and I collaborated of some posters, but that didn't last that long as Gary and I have very different ideas about what we want to do. Gary and my name and signature appear on each Voodoo Catbox poster even though only one of us designed it, you have to know each of our style to know who did it.

From voodoocatbox.com : "Gary Houston has been designing and screen printing for about as long. Being that they have a mutual love for all types of music they decided to form a loose partnership to design and hand print their own posters. "It's to keep the spirit of hands on production alive, and to give voice to less than mainstream musical groups"."

Voodoo Catbox Posters

"Poster art is ground zero of the design movement."

Attack of the Naked Pole Katz | Portland's mayor wages war on a growing urban menace: music posters, diet ads and Haydn. By Zach Dundas - Urban Pulse
Courtesy of Zach Dundas.

[...] The head of Portland's anti-graffiti efforts announced a pilot program aimed at stripping utility and telephone poles along Portland's main pedestrian arteries of the chaotic collages of posters that often jacket them. While some see this free-form propaganda for upcoming rock shows, protests, yard sales and art happenings as the pulse of cultural life, others--including Mayor Vera Katz--see it as a nuisance at best, vandalism at worst. - Katz's office equates this art form with graffiti (the official term is "pole litter"). [...] For most poster critics, the argument is more aesthetic. Many neighborhood activists and merchants view fliers as a visual blight. This isn't the first time the city has responded to such concerns by going on the warpath.
"I think I spoke to a Willamette Week reporter about this very issue 12 years ago," says Mike King, a local graphic designer and poster artist. King and others involved with Portland's art and music scene say a poster wipeout could potentially devastate the city's homegrown culture. For small clubs, bands and galleries, fliers are the one and only source of promotion, and even larger music venues rely on the virtually free medium. [...] Beyond immediate threats to the local arts scene, King says anti-postering efforts could hurt Portland's visual ecology over the long term. "Poster art is ground zero of the design movement," he says. "Everything filters up from there. Ten years ago you didn't see all the distressed, messed-up, distorted graphics that you now see on TV commercials. It all started on telephone poles."