Michal Janicki and collaborators

The Chicago Design Archive

Very proud to have The Chicago Design Archive recognize Trap Door Theatre's production poster designs as part of their permanent collection. The archive is a collection of historically important design as well as a living, growing record of the vibrant Chicago design scene from the 1920s onward. The posters I designed from the past shows of Vatzlav and Dinner with Marx were selected.

Love

In the archives of love.

Underscore Podcast

An interview with Chicago Graphic Designers club on the Underscore Podcast. Host Christian Solorzano chats with me as we explore craft, theory, and practice of graphic design, plus discuss ideas that cultivate a more inclusive and thoughtful creative community.

Love

Love in theory and practice.

Guest Post

What is there to do?

Love

Just to love and be loved in return.

Budget Pigeon

✨My latest side project, Budget Pigeon, a Personal Budgeting Horoscope 🐦✨Read about the process in this article.

Love

Flying high on love.

Mother Courage

Poster design and illustration for Mother Courage and Her Children at Trap Door Theatre. Always a pleasure to work with Max Truax and friends. See all the posters so far here.

Love

Love over courage.

Napkin Poetry Interview

Interview about Poetic Algorithms, AI and the value of creativity with Napkin Poetry. Read it here.

Love

Love feels like poetry.

IDEO Edges Article

An article about my experiment in generating film, music and voice with AI on IDEO’s Edges blog. Read it here.

Love

Love on the Edges.

The Lehaman Brothers

Look mom, I’m on Broadway! Well.. Broadway in Chicago. Illustration and type design for The Lehman Brothers for TimeLine Theatre.

Love

Love can make you do crazy stuff.

Kin

A brief science fiction movie centered on a message transmitted into the cosmos underscores the significance of hearing one's own voice. Created amidst the pandemic, the actor Keith Surney delivered his lines over a video call. The movie debuted at the SF Queer Film Festival.

Love

Love in kinship.

TRAP DOOR THEATRE

Illustration for the Dinner with Marx at Trap Door Theatre.

Love

Love is delicious.

Lockheed Vega

My illustration of a red Lockheed Vega, similar to the one flown by Amelia Earhart across the US in 1932. One of my favorite historic machines.

Love

Love is up in the sky.

Trap Door Theatre

Poster for The Martyrdom of Peter Ohey. This time, the photography was taken by the assistant director, and the concept was fairly set prior to the design. Loving the final output, and we were able to leverage each character as a separate social post to keep the momentum going.

Love

Martyrdom for love!

Trap Door Theatre

So excited for live theatre to come back! Poster for Queen C for Trap Door Theatre. As always, honored to bring their vision to a poster design: trying my hand at organic shapes and a more limited color palette.

Love

Royal love back at you.

Advanced Typography

A type class assignment that never happened: The Infolyric, translating emotion into information and formatting it as a record cover. Maybe next year?

Love

All is full of love.

Trap Door Theatre

Alternate design for the excellent virtual play Discourse Without Grammar by Matei Visniec at Trap Door Theatre. Out of several versions, the red was my favorite.

Love

Love is delicious.

Guest Post

Дизайн - бомба. Я словила эстетический дзен

Love

Спасибо тебе друг!

TRAP DOOR THEATRE

Poster design and photography for the play at Trap Door Theatre.

Love

Staring into a loving eye.

Guest Post

“The truth is out there, but so are lies.” — Agent Dana Scully

Love

I want to believe.

Dimensional Typography

Dimensional type made of rope and flowers as inspiration for an assignment for the Type 4 class at UIC. This design is inspired by the Sagmeister & Walsh book Beauty.

Love

Wrap my heart in clovers.

Advanced Digital Design Course

Remote learning is a challenge, but digital design is specifically well tailored to collaboration utilizing the web. Click the image for examples of student work and approaches to the assignments over the past couple years.

Love

Remote ♥ right back at you.

Eastern Block Car Postcards

A series of illustrations of my family cars from Poland. This Zastava 750 model was the first car my family owned.

Love

Love knows no borders.

Guest Post

“If people are upset because you’ve forgotten something, console them by letting them know you didn’t forget—you just weren’t remembering.”

Love

Unforgettable love back at you.

The Hitchhiker

A still from the animated noir film with music by the legendary queercore pioneer band Jinx Titanic and the Ladykillers.

Love

Thank you for the (queercore) love!

Trap Door Theatre

Poster for The Killer at Trap Door Theatre.

Love

We love you too!

The Hitchhiker

Film title lettering created with Alexander Skoirchet, who drew custom letterforms for both the sans-serif and script type. We sent it to Stefan Sagmeister, who graciously reviewed it on his Instagram.

Love

Love lettering.

The Malkovich Sessions

A book by the iconic Chicago photographer Sandro showcasing his portrait work with John Malkovich. I worked on the design with Greg Samata and Sandro, a wonderful way to see the process of legends in their respective fields. The book is available at local bookstores and via Amazon.

Love

Love being John Malkovich

The City of Highland Park

An exciting branding project for an entire city—from hanging street banners to signage, maps and brochures. The Highlander is a monthly city magazine. Completed while I was a lead designer at Samata LLC. Fun to see the actual pieces in use around the city.

Love

We heart Highland Park

TimeLine Theatre Posters

Collection of illustrations for posters at TimeLine Theatre company in Chicago, looking forward to re-starting the current season.

Love

Chicago Theatre loves you back.

Future Ex-Boyfriend

Performance and persona by Joannie Wu, pole dance instructor and co-founder of soFly Social in Austin, Texas.

Love

He will never love you back honey.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

A still from an animated film funded by a part-time faculty development grant from Columbia College Chicago. Music performed by HECQ. Premiered at the Philip K. Dick film festival.

Love

Our century wants a new hedonism.

Guest Post

sustainable design

Love

A sustainable love.

TimeLine Theatre

Illustrations and design for the iconic TimeLine Theatre in Chicago — seen here on the set of ABC News.

Love

Love is timeless.

Matchsticks

Film title lettering designed by Alexander Skoirchet and art directed by Michal Janicki. Communication Arts Typography Competiton winner.

Love

You set our hearts on fire.

Guest Post

hola

Love

Hola, ¿cómo estás?

The Medieval People

An experimental documentary film based on excerpts from an interview with Lori Cannon, the legendary AIDS activist from Chicago. Premiered at Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ Film Festival.

Love

We are family.

UIC Advanced Digital Design

The final project for the UIC Advanced Digital Media class consists of an animated poster for a national park. We used these posters as a basis for a web campaign that links to all the websites created in the class. We used a grid developed for the National Park Service by Massimo Vignelli to allow for freedom of expression and consistency. His work never ceases to inspire me.

Love

You can say I love you in Helvetica.

Makulatura

A paper typeface animation created with Alexander Skoirchet for a short film. We turned it into an installation at the Chicago Design Museum as part of the Unfolded exhibit.

Love

Unfolded love.

Trap Door Theatre

The latest poster for Trap Door Theatre takes inspiration directly from the 1950s. From the retouching of the photos to the typography.

Love

Love you back a ton!

UIC Advanced Digital Design

Students designed and coded their self-portraits in full HTML with animations. Below is a sample animation based on an illustration by Robert M. Kerr.

Love

Love is a code.

UIC Advanced Digital Design

The midterm for the class consists of organizing projects into a portfolio that is responsive and includes animation states. The coding is done live from a hand-drawn wireframe in order to start using the html language as a way of expression as well as a design tool.

Love

Love is ♥ in HTML.

TimeLine Theatre

Poster design for Kill Move Paradise by James Ijames, directed by Wardell Julius Clark. Striking photography by Joe Mazza is arranged with photography from civil rights history, creating a deconstructed American flag.

Love

Love is a growing up.

TimeLine Theatre

Illustration and poster for Master Class at TimeLine Theatre. A portrait of Maria Callas takes over the whole format with fiery colors.

Love

The artist is always there.

UIC Advanced Digital Design

As a class we looked at the design principles as written by Dieter Rams. We discussed the difference between aesthetics and theory — is it possible to create using defined principles without simply copying the aesthetics? We re-made an existing project, and used the principles as content for a web-based responsive poster.

Love

Love is simple, essential and open.

UIC Advanced Digital Design

To learn about usability design, we coded a simple html and javascript based calculator. Before moving to the visuals, we focused on what are the parts that make it work. Where are buttons located and why? After getting it to work, we had an essential wireframe. We used it to add color, type, and roll-over states to understand how design can aid or interfere with how usable a tool is.

Love

Love is essential.

Alchemical Theatre

Poster designed for Alchemical Theatre in Wilmington, North Carolina. The play was held in protest of a discriminatory bill aimed at trans people introduced in the state government. Shakespeare provided a wonderful analogy to history that keeps on repeating itself.

Love

Love will win in the end.

Columbia College Compositing

In the introduction to compositing class, we studied how we perceive depth in images, and how we can apply basic rules of two dimensional rendering to create an illustion of depth to composited imagery. From the passage of time to environmental noise, the technique of compositing can be understood by breaking images down into different depths.

Love

Love at a great depth.

Columbia College Motion Graphics

An introduction to motion in our class centered on understanding time. The three objects in the gif below take the same amount of time to travel back and forth, but the timing of the frames is distributed unevenly in the bottom two. We looked at how to use the distribution of time to create an emotional repsonse in our viewers, from anticipation to joy.

Love

Love takes time.

Felipe

Modeling shots of my friend Nemiah Felipe Mitchell. We used color gels on the strobes to create a moody and unexpected eye-catching look for his portfolio.

Love

Eye-catching love.

TimeLine Theatre

Illustration and poster for Boy at TimeLine Theatre. Fractured color blocks make up a portrait of the main character, a person that creates their own identity.

Love

Love is transformative.

Willa Vodka

Brand identity and packaging for Willa Vodka designed with the team at Samata. One of the funnest part of the design process was attending vodka tastings with the distillers. Being Polish, I thought I had good prior knowledge on the subject, but I was surprised by the nuances of spirit making. The bottle was shown at the Chgo Dsgn at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Love

Love is organic, and finely crafted.

Amita Health Branding

Noticed the logo we designed at Samata LLC for Amita Health coming up on a lot of buildings in the Chicago area. It looks great backlit.

Love

Love in sickness and in health.

Trap Door Theatre

In 1882 Paul Ree introduced his friend Nietzsche to a young Russian woman named Lou Salome. The three formed a plan to live together as a chaste trio dedicated to a life of the mind. Chaste at Trap Door Theatre is a play that shows what would have been if this plan came to fruition.

Love

Love can be a chaste comedy.

Be Magazine

An award-winning magazine developed as part of the brand identity for be.group, a senior living community, created at Samata LLC. We interviewed and photographed residents in the be.group communities. Their stories and energy are fascinating and make for a great read.

Love

Be love.

Cytrina Liqueur

Naming, logo and bottle design for Cytrina Liqueur created at Samata. A crisp and classic look for a crisp mixer.

Love

Love in a bottle.

Wild Onion Brewing Logo

Logo design for Chicagoland’s early craft brewing pioneers: a graphic re-interpretation of an onion. Glad to see this logo country-wide in different bars, pubs and liquor stores.

Love

Love as strong as onions.

Trap Door Theatre

Poster design for Naked by Luigi Pirandello. A Picasso-inspired female figure painting is observed by a group of male characters. Their gaze, rather than discovering truth, is a projection of their own thoughts and desires.

Love

Love is a naked truth.

Morningstar, Inc.

My first full time job out of school was at Morningstar, Inc. This amazing company shaped my skills in Chicago and London. One of my favorite pieces I worked on was bringing to life a series of displays that greeted people on each floor of the Chicago office. Together with the team, we connected each display to live data, both financial and wayfinding. We set up a control system and instructions so that other designers could create new pieces for the displays.

Love

Love brings clarity.

Trupiak

Trailer for a short film co-produced and screened by Oracle Productions, a public access arts center in Chicago. Trupiak tells the story of an ominous school for Polish immigrants who are held captive and magically tranformed into anitque furniture.

Love

Magically transformative love.

Magi

A visual study for a video interpretation of the biblical tale of the Magi – the three kings, or wise men – who traveled the world to give gifts to the newly born Jesus of Nazareth.

Love

Bringing you the gifts of love.

Friedman + Huey

I am always so satisfied when graphic design can bring moments of delight to industries where people least expect it. This design for an accounting firm created while at Samata LLC did just that.

Love

Love in unexpected places.

Anyallerie Fine Jewellery

Amazing to see the Anyallerie logo design we created on their brand new flaship store in Bangkok.

Love

Finely crafted love.

More human than human

I took photos of Neo Nightclub patrons which were used for promotional posters designed by Johnny Mei, and serve as a time-capsule catalog of the visitors.

Love

Industrial strength love.

Matchsticks

Short excerpt from the film Matchsticks, which premiered at the AGLIFF film festival in Austin Texas, and was later part of the Moving Pictures exhibit at GAG Gallery. This part of the film pays tribute to the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Love

He existed in time.

Mort Couture

Collage series attempting to reclaim the visual realm of glamour from corporate control.

Love

Love you more than retail therapy.

Trap Door Theatre

Poster and photography for a play based on the poetry of Wisława Szymborska, a nobel prize winner from Poland. Having read a lot of her work, the project was daunting, but the idea of migrants trying to levitate their suitcases seemed just right.

Love

True love, is it practical?

Lo Rez Brewery

Beer label design centering around the idea of different wood types representing the type of beer in the bottle. The darker the wood, the darker the beer.

Love

Love comes in all shades.

Communication Arts

Morning light on the Communication Arts Award of Excellence that Alexander Skoirchet and I won for our typographic work on the Matchsticks film.

Love

Love is the best reward.

Jinx Titanic and the Ladykillers

Art direction and photography for an EP cover of the Chicago band Jinx Titanic and the Ladykillers.

Love

Love sizzles like a good cigar.

The Woman Behind the Wall

Still from the film The Woman Behind the Wall. Shooting this film was a challenge, as it was done during two 24 hour days in front of a green screen on a hot summer with a broken air conditioner in the studio, but the result is a charming noir.

Love

Love can take a lot of work.

Trap Door Theatre

Poster and photography for John Doe by Stanisław Witkiewicz at Trap Door Theatre.

Love

Repressed truth even in lies.

Matchsticks

Still from the film Matchsticks. One of my favorive film festival experiences was during the premiere of this film at the aGLIFF festival in Austin, Texas.

Love

Love brightly.

Impossible Objects Website

Impossible Objects is a 3D printing company that works with carbon fiber and fiberglass, revolutionizing the manufacturing process. While at Samata, we created a website that was inspired by nature, rather than the sleek and modern aesthetics of competitors. It was an amazing experience to work with a client that wanted to push the boundaries of how a website could look like and function.

Love

Love is doing the impossible.

Eating Our Words

We manufactured candy hearts with six commonly used words seen in gay dating apps. These were given to Chicago bar patrons, asking each to eat the phrase they have used to describe themselves. The frequency of the phrases was recorded. In collaboration with Robert M. Kerr.

Love

Not love but it tastes great.

Makulatura

Trailer for the short film Makulatura. A surrealist take on routine, creativity and authority.

Love

Love is an experiment.

Brian James Dickie

Brian is a staple in the Chicago music and film scene, from Metro and Smartbar to Neo Nightclub and many films and tv shows. I art directed and photographed him in a more relaxed pose rather than the sterotypical look that makes up a lot of his television and movie appearances.

Love

Love is a good tattoo.

Trupiak

Promotional still image from the short film Trupiak created using paper art made by Reina Takahashi.

Love

Paper art love.

Other Studio

Photography for an anniversary invitation for the fantastic Other Studio under the creative direction of the brilliant Eileen Tjan.

Love

Love the other.

The Woman Behind The Wall

Part animation, and part live action, The Woman Behind the Wall is a film shot entirely on green-screen. We raised funds for the actors and crew by hosing a concert at the Empty Bottle, and got to work with amazing DPs and editors to bring it together. It screened on two nights at Facets, Chicago.

Love

Love is stronger than walls.

Levitations

A decontextualized view of a pole dance performace by Joannie Wu of soFly Social in Austin, Texas.

Love

Decontextualized love.

Dark Stars Poster

Poster for the play by Arthur Meek, performed by Jonathan Council. The play toured Australia and New Zealand.

Love

Love is remembering.

Good50x70 Poster

A social communication project that included international public poster exhibitions and publications benefitting nonprofit organizations. Work was selected by an international jury including Massimo Vignelli and Alain Le Quernec. My selected poster focused on decriminalization of those living wtih HIV, and was utilized by Amnesty International.

Love

Love is not a crime.

Harold & Bunnie

Created with Joannie Wu as a music video for a David Lynch song, the story follows the unraveling fantasies of Harold & Bunnie, as they become aware of the grim realities of their desires. We shot the film in the classic Heart O Chicago Motel with Johnny Mei.

Love

Love can be fluffy like a bunny.

Morningstar Investment Konferenz

Book cover design for the Morninstar Investment Conference in Germany. The microphone icon used on Morningstar investment reports is used to center the theme of communication.

Liebe

Liebe ist Kommunikation.

Morningstar Direct

Design for a mousepad promoting the launch of Morningstar Direct, an investment software. The idea of forward movement is communicated with the use of a simple grid on a 45 degree angle. This was my first project while I worked at Morningstar, and still one of my favorites.

Love

Direct love right back at you.

Tilt

Film title lettering by Johnny Mei. The short movie is about a stabbing, so the title letters take on an elegantly simplified knife shape.

Titlt film title lettering by Johnny Mei, inspired by knives.

Love

Love with a new perspective.

Trap Door Theatre

Poster and photography for Vatzlav by Sławomir Mrożek at Trap Door Theatre.

Love

Art has a noble task.

Shotgun 2

A short film created with my friend Barry Branford. A short study on casual hook-ups in a big city, recontextualized to focus on the wonder, anticipation and adventure of seeking out brief connections with strangers.

Love

Love can be for right now.

Insult Clock

An alarm clock app concept conceived and created in one day with Jessi Adrignola and Jason Schifferer.

Love

Love to sleep in.

Studiobema

Designing for yourself can be hard, but coding that design can be harder still. This single-page iteration of my site is still one of my favorites. My friend Jason Schifferer helped me with a javascript that highlighted each section of the page as the user scrolled. The site was featured on Site Inspire along with a few other online showcases. I was happy when I saw the section-highlight script pop up on a few other pages across the web.

Love

Love yourself first.

Make Mistakes

Artwork produced for the AIGA Self Portraits book — a collection of advice from designers to their younger selves. My advice to myself continues to be “make more mistakes.”

Love

Not a mistake.

The New Jackson Hotel

A neo-noir film I created with my friends and colleagues. A fun experiment shot on one of the first SLR cameras with video capability. The film follows a detective who is searching for a missing woman who lived right next door to his apartment.

Love

Love thy neighbor.

UIC Graphic Design Class

A hand-crafted exercise I completed during my sophmore year of studies at UIC with professor Philip Burton. We painted the shapes, getting the balance just right, then cut them out at different scales and arranged as compositions. In the end, we added text to create a series of four covers. It was hard to understand at the time, but these studies have proven to be useful so many years later.

Love

Love is a shape.