Starting out as a graphic designer in the early 90s, Colin Metcalf was wowed by Raygun, the David Carson-designed cultural magazine that exploded the staid graphic arts scene of the day. It defied traditional design logic: layouts and typefaces looked like they’d been run through a blender and poured onto the page. Metcalf had never seen anything like it, and it opened his eyes, he says, to the radical notion that there wasn’t any “right” graphic way to get your ideas across.
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Metcalf, who grew up in suburban LaGrange Park, graduated from the University of Colorado in 1988 and, after a year in London, moved to Chicago to work as a freelance designer. In 1996 he and some friends founded the Low-Res digital film festival, which later became Resfest, and Res magazine, a publication devoted to the digital filmmaking scene. The partners sold what was by then the Res Media Group in 2000, at the peak of the new-economy boom, and Metcalf decided to move to New York and stay on as the design director of the magazine. But just a year later, shaken by September 11, he took a trip to New Mexico and rethought his decision. “I walked around the desert talking to myself like an idiot,” he says. “I wasn’t on drugs. I wish I were–it would have been more fun.”
Metcalf had some money from the sale of Res, and after a bit of brainstorming he and Grady, the former design director for an ad agency, began work on Gum. “We complement each other perfectly,” says Metcalf. “My style is ultrabaroque, with an excess of detail; he likes to strip everything down.”
The new Gum, packaged in a cardboard box that doubles as a gum ball dispenser, includes an interview with Ray Bradbury, a tribute to Mr. Rogers, a View-Master disk, and a packet of puma-shaped gummy candy; it should be available in stores by April 23. Metcalf, Hilary, and local design firm Tanagram Partners are hosting a launch party from 6 to 9 on Wednesday, April 21, at Sonotheque, 1444 W. Chicago. E-mail colin@gumweb.com for more information.
