Mikey Burton

Mikey, letterpress is such a beautiful medium, what is the attraction to producing work on a letterpress?
I went to Kent State University, and they have a great letterpress facility called Type High Press. Ever since college, I’ve had this deep love for the process. It’s just such a tactile method of printing, nothing can compare to it.

Does this influence the way that you design or think about typography?
I think the handmade aesthetic of letterpress is something that really influences my design. I love the mottled quality you can achieve from letterpress and I try to find different ways to emulate it in my work.

What is the best thing that has happened to you during your career?
I’ve been in a few publications which is always an honor. My one major goal when I was in school was to have a piece featured in Communication Arts, and I can happily say it has happened (twice). Recently, my biggest honor was when I received a personal email from Steven Heller about being featured on The Daily Heller.

Do you have any designers that you look to for inspiration?
Older designers: Lester Beall, Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser & Seymour Chwast), Hatch Show Print, Sister Corita Kent, Sagmeister, Mo Lebowitz, Modern Dog Design Co, Lance Wyman, Saul Bass, Pentgram, Alvin Lustig, Roger Dean, Hipgnosis, Charley Harper, Gerd Arntz.

More Current: Aesthetic Apparatus, hammerpress, Yee-Haw Industries, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., Studio On Fire, Dirk Fowler, Alan Kitching, Mucca, Paul Sahre, Felix Sockwell, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Office(SF), Draplin Design Co., CSA Design.

You run a business called Little Jacket, how did this start out?
While in grad school two of my friends and I were very interested in the resurgence of handmade gig-poster art. We were fascinated by this, and were eager to try our hand at it. Also, there was a lack of poster art happening in Northeast Ohio, so we took it upon ourselves to fill this void. We taught ourselves how to (poorly) screenprint and gave ourself the moniker, Little Jacket (taken from an LCD Soundsystem song “…little jackets and borrowed nostalgia from the unremembered eighties”).  We had done about 3 posters for local venues around Cleveland. After that, one of the same venues asked us to do a poster for the upcoming Modest Mouse show. From there we started getting emails from people about doing ‘real work’.

Do you have any future projects planned, or on the go?
I’m currently working on my first lecture! It’s for the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts (CSCA) in Ohio. I’m really excited/nervous to do it, but I’m ready for the challenge.

Do you have any advice for young creatives that want to get ahead in the industry of visual communication?
You can’t wait around for that dream project/client/job to happen to you, cause it’s never going to. You have to go out there an make it happen yourself. Invent your own things to work on. Self initiated project are the best things you can be doing.

Visit Mikey Burton’s site for more of his work.