Poster Children

Montreal-based poster-design firm Seripop is coming soon to a wall near you.

When Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau set up a silk-screening studio in their Montreal apartment, the last thing they expected was to make a living from it. “We never thought we’d end up being designers,” Lum says. “We were art students who were playing in punk bands and kind of fell into it.” Three years later the duo called Seripop has turned a side project into a full-time design business.

The transition began when they posted a technical question on www.gigposters.com—a Web community for poster designers—and heard back from a rock-poster legend. “We ended up getting an answer from Art Chantry, so we just started corresponding with him,” Lum says. “We were able to get him, Frank Kozik, and Jeff Kleinsmith, the art director at Sub Pop, as kind of correspondence-school professors. They were really supportive—especially Art. He didn’t mince words with how we could improve.”

Seripop’s rough hand-drawn graphics were becoming stronger, but their client base was still small. So, harking back to their punk-band days, Lum and Desranleau took their posters on tour to rock festivals, all-age venues, bars, and small galleries around the country. The promo tours were successful enough that they quit their jobs and started Seripop (short for Sérigraphie Populaire) full-time in 2002. In the past two-and-a-half years they’ve designed 250 posters—which they screen print themselves—and dozens of album covers, T-shirts, and magazine illustrations. The two have now submitted work for their first corporate campaign and are starting to explore fine-art applications for the automated printing press they recently bought. More examples of there work follow below.

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