Picnic Posters

The posters for Herman Miller’s summer picnics that joined the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection

Herman Miller was founded in 1905 as Star Furniture Co. and got the name they have today (with minor adjustments) in 1923. They make furniture—you probably know them from chairs like the Eames Lounge or the Aeron office chair.

Less well known are their summer picnics, specifically the posters advertising them. The annual employee picnics were sporadic events at first and became a yearly tradition in the mid 1940s. However, the first poster wasn’t made until 1970 when Herman Miller hired Steve Frykholm as their first in-house graphic designer. He had just graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and one of his first assignments in the new job was to design a poster for the upcoming picnic: “Sweet Corn Festival”.

He used screen-printing for the posters, a technique he had learned about while serving in the Peace Corps in Nigeria. This is how it works:

First you make a stencil (the screen) by coating a mesh with a light-sensitive emulsion. The design is then printed onto a transparent film, placed on the screen and exposed to UV light. The light hardens the emulsion everywhere except where the design blocks it. You then wash out the soft areas, leaving open mesh where ink will pass through.

The screen is mounted on a press above the paper or fabric you want to print on and ink is placed at one end of a screen. You drag a squeegee across the screen to push the ink through the open areas of the mesh onto the substrate below. Then you let the ink dry and repeat this process for every color.

Steve designed the posters until 1989, making a total of 20 picnic posters. In 1980 he got a letter from the New York Museum of Modern Art saying that his posters had been accepted into their permanent collection. Since then they have joined the collections of several other museums.

After 1989 Kathy Stanton designed the posters until 2000. You might have noticed that the earlier posters all showed food, her motives focused on picnic activities instead.

From 2001 to 2005 Brian Edlefson made the designs and Andrew Dull created the final two posters in 2006 and 2007.

I am not sure what happened to the company picnic after that. Steve Frykholm is still at Herman Miller and I recommend reading this interview with him about the posters. Kathy Stanton left the company in 2008 and now works as a freelance designer and artist according to this article. Brian Edlefson left in 2003 and is founder of his own creative agency Thesis and Director of Creative & Digital Services at University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business. Andrew Dull founded Concept A Creative Studio in 2008.