Rick Griffith and MATTER create Market Street mural for New Belgium Brewing (VIDEO)

Last January, we profiled local type-and-design maestro Rick Griffith and his MATTER studio. Much of the story focused on small details -- the tiny serifs on a font, miniscule measurements between blocks of text on ancient letterpress printers. But Griffith and his crew also work big, as in a new...

By Joel Warner

August 1, 2011

Audio By Carbonatix

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Last January, we profiled local type-and-design maestro Rick Griffith and his MATTER studio. Much of the story focused on small details -- the tiny serifs on a font, miniscule measurements between blocks of text on ancient letterpress printers. But Griffith and his crew also work big, as in a new ten-story-long New Belgium Brewing mural on the 2100 block of Market Street.

Griffith and his merry band of pranksters spent a month of late nights replacing the old mural at the site -- a vista of happy hill monsters painted by Jesse LeDoux on behalf of the now-shuttered local Adenken Gallery -- with a new one sponsored by New Belgium Brewing. It's a festive, colorful alternative, one that perfectly captures Griffith's scrappy side. For those who want to see the mural creation in action, MATTER has posted a series of time-lapse videos of the job, including the one below.

New Belgium Mural - Primer Time Lapse from MATTER on Vimeo.

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Joel Warner is a former staff writer for Westword and International Business Times. He's also written for WIRED, Men's Journal, Men's Health, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, Slate, Grantland and many other publications. He's co-author of the 2014 book The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, published by Simon & Schuster.

Contact: Joel Warner