Pittsburgh Poster - Press Releases

Billboards Evolved From Gorillas!
or . . . What do you tell your Mother when you decide not to follow your college major as a career?

If you don’t think that’s funny, then you never had to tell your family that you were going to print Mona Gorilla T-Shirts and then outdoor billboard posters for a living and weren’t going to follow in the footsteps of Jonas Salk, Madam Curie, or even Leonard Bernstein.

Design Dynamics’ Mona Gorilla
The group above is the founding staff of National Lampoon Magazine. The two tall guys are editors Tony Hendra and NL founder Doug Kenney. The photo was part of a T-Shirt sales ad in appeared in the 9/’72 issue of National Lampoon Magazine.

NL was one of the early clients of Design Dynamics, back when the company printed T-Shirts instead of the large and grand format printed products produced today.

Design Dynamics placed a classified ad in the New York publication Womens’ Wear Daily proclaiming that the company could print anything on any garment. National Lampoon couldn’t find anyone in New York with the technology to put their Mona Gorilla on a T-Shirt so they came to Design Dynamics to get the job done.

Billboards Evolved From Gorillas...
At least that’s the story from the history of Design Dynamics and Pittsburgh Poster

Our story begins 29 Years Ago (nearly a third of a Century ago) when two enterprising entrepreneurs with $350 they borrowed on a bank charge card started printing T-Shirts for Pittsburgh’s largest department stores.

Their printed T-Shirts and designs were instantly on the racks of Kaufmann’s, Horne’s and Gimbel’s. Soon after, their shirts emblazoned with National Lampoon Magazine’s first anniversary cover, Mona Gorilla, were selling from the pages of the magazine. Next came promo T-Shirts advertising hot upbeat radio stations.

This is one of the photos used in the NL T-shirt sales campaign of the Design Dynamics T-shirts.

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Design Dynamics, Inc. was born, up and running from their HeadQuarters’ Boutique basement. The orders got so big the operation was moved to an old 15 lane Duck Pin bowling alley 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh in Ambridge, PA.

One cold October morning the dynamic duo held a reality check. How would they ever sell their T-Shirts in Western Pennsylvania’s winters?

“We need a year ‘round product!”

“How about outdoor billboard posters?” Now there’s a thought.

That was only 28 years ago.

Pittsburgh Poster came about as a division of Design Dynamics, Inc.

What do you do for an encore?
Today the main Design Dynamics / Pittsburgh Poster plant is housed in a 30,000 square foot industrial facility with 2.2 acres of room for expansion.

Design Dynamics first became computerized in 1984 with CAD/CAM vector graphics equipment introduced into the art department. The next ten years were spent developing new art and printing production techniques that have revolutionized large format printing and grand format outdoor billboard printing.

In 1994 raster computers were introduced into the Pittsburgh Poster art department and by 1996 the marriage of vector to raster was developed into some spectacular processes for the company.

For the year 2000 we celebrated another production marriage this time we combined digital printing with screen printing in the same posters.

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