If Helvetica presented the design world as one of Swiss precision and exactitude, a place where people with highfalutin degrees and impeccable credentials debate the particulars of modern and postmodern design, then Eileen Yaghoobian’s Died Young, Stayed Pretty is its anarchic cousin, hungover, slapping together a collage of idiosyncratic found images and figuring out what it all means after, if it bothers to debate meaning at all before moving on to something else.

 

Maybe the most striking thing about Yaghoobian’s documentary about the men and women who make gig posters is the (rather fitting, considering the aw-shucks and/or fuck-off attitude of the indie rock that’s at the center of this collection) utter lack of pretension: while in some cases that translates to a sort of dimwitted ineloquence, for the most part it comes across as an honestly excited, curious, creative spirit, one engaged with it work without taking it too solemnly, and without needing an academic framework. 

 

In that spirit, Yaghoobian avoids plopping an artifical framework on top of the legions of interviews she’s done with various poster designers, instead letting their pet obsessions, musings on particular pieces of work and thoughts on life create their own connections and threads. A fractured group spread all over North America, with few group guiding principles, the designers are an idiosyncratic bunch, but Yaghoobian skillfully weaves together their varied subjects, pointing towards common obsessions (old pop culture and death seem to be particularly popular) and slipping in and out of unintentional but still fascinating debates.

 

It’s those that ultimately make Died Young a success, the motley collection of designers making sense of their work through a series of punk, counterculture, socialist and aesthetic frameworks, never indulging in arch pretentiousness, but nevertheless revealing and revelling in all the things that a simple gig poster can be. V