Moosylvania Poster Sale Helps Joplin

Brook Boyer, who grew up in St. Louis and works in Maplewood, has family ties to Joplin. Her grandmother lives in Joplin and was directly affected by the devastating tornado that swept through the city.

"I just remember looking at all the pictures, and it was overwhelming," Boyer said. "I felt so helpless, like I feel a lot of people here did. You can donate and stuff, but there was just an unbelievable amount of destruction, it's like, where do I begin?"

So an idea came to her.

Boyer is a designer at , a marketing firm in Maplewood with a culture of community service. She proposed that the art directors there design commemorative Joplin posters, which would be sold to raise proceeds to help rebuild Joplin.

"I've always been very impressed with all the work that the art directors here have done, and I thought that it would be really cool," Boyer said.

"Moose is the kind of place where if you have an idea and the energy, we'll push you and give you support and let you fly," said Rachel Hamblin, a Moosylvania writer. "She proposed it, and the response was enormous."

Over Memorial Day weekend, 16 Moosylvania art directors designed unique posters with their own time and inspiration. They were constrained only by color: red and blue, like the Missouri flag, were the colors to be used.

"It's sort of like a kinship of being in Missouri, that we're all in this together, you're our neighbors, no matter what," Hamblin said. "(Color) unites them as a collection, but at the same time lets each piece be that artist's expression of how they feel about the situation."

Proceeds from the sale will go to the United Way Small Business Fund, a fund specifically set up help rebuild Joplin's economy.

"Since this is being done by our small business, and we have an opportunity to help all these other small businesses, it just seemed like such a great fit," Hamblin said.

Each designer brought their own background and skills to the project. One Moosylvania art director, Nick Becker loves to sketch, so he researched Missouri icons, like the state flower and the state bird. He drew them by hand then scanned and incorporated the sketches into his poster.

"It's something that you don't normally get to do, hand illustration," Becker said. "This is my chance to do that, so that's where I went with my poster, which is the 'Missouri Pride.'" Each poster is named.

They've set June 20 as the cutoff date to stop selling and start printing and shipping the posters. The posters will be hand silk-screened at a print shop in south St. Louis and hand-numbered and signed by the artists.

They've been promoting the posters on Moosylvania's blog, on Facebook, Twitter, and through news outlets. The posters can be viewed and purchased on the Moosylvania website.