Interview with Microcosm Publishing
I haven't been to Cleveland or Portland!
Joe founded Microcosm Publishing (Website, Instagram) in Cleveland, Ohio in 1996. It moved to Portland in 1998. The Vice-President and co-owner of Microcosm, Elly, describes Joe as their resident sticker expert, with “almost 30 years of professional and personal sticker lore and practice to draw on.”
1) What is your earliest sticker memory?
Joe: In the 80s, Cleveland was covered in graffiti and I saw slap tag stickers around town when my family was visiting the natural history museum around 1982. Some of these looked like graffiti but were obviously stickers. Around the same time, my grandma got me a sticker book that I began putting in inappropriate places and I'm pretty sure those two events sealed my fate.
2) Tell me about your professional history in the sticker industry.
Joe: I suppose I started by screenprinting stickers for bands in my basement around the late 90s but so many of them were big fish in small ponds with unrealistic expectations. Oh, but there was also the sticker design collective that I had with my friends before that. I quickly went into designing absurd statements like "i will listen and judge" and drawings of friends. This was naturally followed by a little war with someone who was putting up "Oddio" stickers in Portland fifteen years back. I decided that any time that I saw one of their stickers I'd put my tag up next to it. But they were absurdly prolific, like thousands of stickers all over the city and I could never keep up! Of course, I soon found out that the owner of the company was the son of my former boss at University of Oregon, which made it especially funny. I still put up stickers but after doing so for four decades I now mostly stare at wonder at how little the aesthetic and culture changes.
3) What trends are you seeing in stickers?
Joe: The black on black thing was weird enough but the translation to all digital printing and die cuts...well, it's hard to call those trends as they are likely here to stay but the low-contrast, hard-to-read aesthetic of stickers is a nice pile-on to the inscrutable art and messaging of the early 00s!
4) What is your favourite sticker that you have created?
Joe: Someone started putting up stickers around town that said "This is not New York" so I designed a sticker of the same size/color/font that says "Is this New York?" to put next to it. I'm not sure if anyone gets the joke. Mostly, these days, I just get a good chuckle when someone puts in a sticker in an absurd location or designs something particularly funny.
You can find Joe and other creators’ stickers for sale online.
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