above is a poster they designed for a German magazine, AM, on the theme of speed. jumping off from the editor's interest in Marinetti's 'The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,' Experimental Jetset combined a phrase from Marinetti with the first line from the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. in talking about modernism in "Design and Ideology," Sept. 2008 they say: "The reason why, in our work, we often refer to the aesthetic language of past modernist movements (and especially the language of so-called 'late modernism') is twofold. On the one hand, referring to historical modernism is for us a way to achieve the 'self-referentiality' we already discussed a few paragraphs earlier. In our opinion, by letting graphic design refer to its own modernist history, the construction of the medium becomes visible, which we see as a modernist gesture. On the other hand, the references to late modernism in our work have a clear emotional undertone. For us, late modernism is the context in which we grew up, our childhood, our natural language, our mother tongue. In our work, we are actively investigating late modernism, because it is the material environment that shaped us. This makes our emotional motive also a modernist one."

another reason i am including experiment jetset here is because of their t-shirt (above). originally designed for a Japanese t-shirt label, the form of the stacked names joined by ampersands has been copied hundreds of times around the world. something about that form hit a popular chord and it has circulated far from the original source. i feel like i almost see one of the copies every day -- i wonder how i would feel if something i made was copied this extensively, proud or pissed.