Commercial Article, a pamphlet style magazine created by brothers James and Jon Sholly of the Indianapolis based graphic design studio Commercial Artisan. (Commercial Article is © 2009 Commercial Artisan). Their aim and hope is “To feature noteworthy and neglected design figures”. Issue number 2 is entirely dedicated to Muncie, IN based graphic designer Fred Bower, a Cranbrook Grad of 1994 and he is a faculty member at Ball State University in Indiana. Download the pdf here, or contact Commercial Artisan for a print copy.

An Excerpt from the pamphlet:

FRED BOWER
The Morgan Museum of Cultural Phenomenon can’t be located on any map or registry of cultural institutions. Instead, it exists solely as an umbrella concept under which Fred Bower, an idiosyncratic graphic designer who lives and works in Muncie, Indiana, explores any number of personal interests and creates projects utilizing the language of graphic design to represent them. “When I think about how I view design work,” Fred says, “I see it as a romance with ephemera, but not . . . as the easily dismissed, unimportant part of an event or occurrence.” His work is a diverse collection of bits and pieces of personal iconography. He uses found and self-generated illustrations, colorless photography, textbook text, and his own mordant commentary to solve particular (frequently self-generated) design challenges that, in turn, invite the viewer to explore the problem on their own. This, the second issue of Commercial Article, invites you to learn more.

Fred was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1967 and moved with his family in 1976 when his father, a computer systems analyst, was transferred to Indianapolis, Indiana. These banal facts of Fred’s origins belie the significance of this move, which might be credited with how Fred came to study graphic design at the Herron School of Art, conveniently located in Indianapolis. He did not pursue this path because of a deep-seeded love of design, but rather because of his father’s idealistic belief that cartoonists were all millionaires. The senior Bower’s financial and career advice – “This [cartoon] is so clever, this guy must be making money”—led Fred to enroll in Herron in the autumn of 1990, despite the fact that it had no cartooning
program.

At the time, the Visual Communications program at Herron, like many of its contemporary counterparts, was dealing with the shift in focus between modern and post-modern ideologies. As a sophomore, Fred’s instructors included recent graduates from Michigan’s esteemed Cranbrook Academy of Art. The influence of these instructors led Fred to design work that incorporated personal expression and eccentric and formal experimentation—a far cry from the Bauhaus-based curriculum of previous Herron classes, but which, as one can see from the Morgan’s collection, is close to Fred’s heart.