James Paris designs bumper stickers inspired by Christian youth group clip art and typewriter activity books

James Paris’ recent show with the Philadelphia’s design-forward hotel Yowie, Honk If You Love Me, featured a collection of bumper stickers that the creative has designed over the years. His humorous work takes on the hatchback baby-on-board bumper sticker tradition – but with a twist: one of James' reads ‘I’m not looking for parking, this is my victory lap’.

These stickers are an outlet; an exercise for James outside of client work. They touch on personal mantras, as well as his love for cinema. One sticker makes reference to a fan phrase derived from Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers – ‘Don’t mess with the Duncanator’, and another play on the film’s themes simply says, ‘Your wife’. As fun as they are to make, they provide a very real lesson for James. He shares, “It’s a reminder to keep things silly and not take work too seriously.”

James likes to navigate between physical and digital design by setting limitations: “I rarely start with a sketch. I like setting physical limits,” he says, instead beginning with loose ideation and following through as the concept meanders. He tears newsprint, working until the paper runs out, and it’s these challenges he sets that push out his design to a wonderful periphery.

James’ digital collage and illustration technique draws from source material, from physical graphics from old magazines to the digital treasure trove of Internet Archive. This pandora’s box of material is at James’ fingertips, he says: “I’ve collected everything from 1980s Christian youth group clipart to 1930s typewriter activity books.” Collage, for James, is a method of breathing new life into old visuals and recreating the world as he sees it, he takes on visual spectres of the past and reanimates them with cheeky copy.

Going even further back in time, James’ first real graphic design projects were album covers for iTune rips before he decided to pursue design further at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. Inspired by their abilities to blend the realms of graphic design and illustration, two contemporary design influences for James are Bráulio Amado, and founder of Fisk studio Bijan Berahimi. Whilst still a design student, James reached out to Yowie’s founder Shannon Maldonado over an Instagram DM, and, “six years later, Yowie is still my favourite client to work with”, says James , having worked on a number of projects, including a collaboration with Hanna Karraby on the branding for Yowie’s cafe, Wim.

In some more recent work for Yowie, James’ work carries a playful restraint across the establishment’s signage, merchandise and menus. One design segments the name’s lettering into each petal of a daisy, and the snacks menu is accompanied by a illustration of a chocolate bar bitten into. With graphic design often set for client-driven problem solving, and illustration a much more personal practice for James, the melding of the two head spaces, is where James says he creates his most standout work. Yowie remains, and seems to always be, a personal affair for the designer.