I’ll keep this short cause, attention spans, but, Chris Tucci appreciation post! Yeah, you may have seen his work with Regina Spector, Olivia Rodrigo, Aleka’s Attic, KD Davison, Gus Van Sant or Flea, to name a few. But, if you’ll humor me, I want to take us back nearly 15 years to when I met Chris, and share how he came to join the alliance of artists at LaunchLeft.
In the early part of 2010, I was meant to play a show at Bootleg Theatre in Los Angeles with my then band papercranes. I was feeling somewhat meh about the show. I didn’t really want to be a lead singer anymore. I wanted to collaborate with other artists and do something meaningful. Around that time, I met Kathy Eldon through my friend Mickey. Kathy has this incredible foundation called Creative Visions that supports creative activists along their journey by creating a non-profit umbrella for projects. I wanted to raise funds for Haiti after the devastating earthquake that hit on January 12, 2010. Enter Gift Horse Project, or “artists supporting artists in crisis,” an early iteration of LaunchLeft, in many ways. I switched the show from papercranes to GHP and once that was settled, the first thing I did was reach out to friend and fine artist Chris Tucci in New York. I’d recently met him and seen his art work at the then newly built ACE Hotel in Manhattan. (He actually went on to do a music night there, but that’s for another story.) I loved his drawings, aesthetic, graphic design- I loved his art. So I asked if he’d consider creating a logo for Gift Horse Project. He said yes.
There were many incredible artists involved in GHP and we had a fun and successful run playing LA/NY/MARFA/PARIS. If you’re curious you can find a little bit about it on NOWNESS. OK, now back to Chris.
This is the logo he made for GHP.
I’m still obsessed with this image
Here are a few flyers:
For a while I thought GHP was going to be the name of what is now LaunchLeft, but there were some trademark issues so I had to come up with a new name. Enter LaunchLeft. Fellow left-handed friend, wordsmith and full on rock star, Michael Stipe (who is also a visual artist/sculpture/photographer) was instrumental in the name and in suggesting logo ideas. His main artist reference for a potential logo was Josef Albers. So once again, I reached out to Chris Tucci to come up with the logo based on the idea of an arrow pointing left or a reverse play button.
Here is the first iteration:
Cool right?
When we started the podcast again in 2019, Chris updated the logo to this.
And then, soon after that, I insisted Chris move to LA so we could work together more regularly on LaunchLeft. And now, many cool designs and meaningful experiences later, big thanks to Chris Tucci for your art, friendship, and for enriching the work of LaunchLeft immeasurably.
For more on Chris, go to: GOODNITESTUDIO.COM
You can also look at more recent flyers we love that he created for Launchleft.
