As the Chair of BFA Comics & BFA Illustration at the School of Visual Arts, Viktor Koen’s work hits you like a slow burn—creeping in with striking visuals before unraveling into something more profound. His Gold Award-winning posters for the School of Visual Arts (“The Yellow Wallpaper” and “SVA Blood Drive”) showcase his ability to turn the eerie and unexpected into visual statements. With a ghostly house that seems alive and a blood drive poster channeling Nosferatu, Viktor mixes dark allure with a fine-tuned design sensibility, creating haunting narratives waiting to be unraveled, one detail at a time.

The Yellow Wallpaper

The announcement for the School of Visual Arts MFA Illustration Department exhibition is based on the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A ghostly house, a haunted wallpaper, and the color yellow inspired this cryptic composition where everything happens under the surface. As a result, this mysterious poster attracts attention with its stark composition and atmospheric depth while inviting the discovery of hidden clues layer after layer. This mirrors the gradual succession of events to the narrative’s eerie conclusion.

Designing a hauntingly anthropomorphic wallpaper texture was my first inclination, but after sketching what this could look like, it felt limited, repetitive, and flat. Featuring the house as a protagonist presented a better solution as I researched for period ingredients that could compose an intimidating structure with enough character to make it stand out as the central focal point but also morph into a shadow for the bottom part of the poster.

Adding some delicate textuality to this bold composition, the large portrait was adorned by a faintly detectable wallpaper I photographed at a once grand hotel in New York some years ago. Bates Motel aside, leaving the light on in the second-floor bedroom proved irresistible. 

At first, typography scratched by fingernails seemed like a solid idea (I like to first opt for type solutions organic to the illustration), but my initial tests looked nothing like what I had in mind, and I found this to be a dead-end. In retrospect, an overdramatic type solution would have competed with the hunting yet alluring atmosphere the image tries to project. The design required a typeface that would not look like an obvious period choice but wouldn’t over-modernize it either. As a final touch, embossing the type unit adequately wallpapered it; the rest is history.

SVA Blood Drive

The poster was produced to promote the first School of Visual Arts Blood Drive. Halloween spirit provided the approach to this challenging subject with a homage to the Count Orlok character from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent masterpiece Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. 

Even though Count Orlok loomed large on my mind for the poster’s dramatic mood and character gesture, sketching on paper allowed for flexibility in figuring out its final staging and composition. Knowing that the project required lots of information, figuring out the negative space to accommodate it without upstaging the illustration took time.

Developing this vampire was a Frankensteinian process of mixing mostly vintage photographs with delicate detailing (no matter how much I tried photographing my hands in Draculesque poses, they never got close to how scary the original is). When done in stages, background, coloring, and distressed textures come last to turn this composite into a seamless illustration with cinematic flair.

Asking people for their blood is tricky, so keeping the visual tasteful yet edgy enough to attract attention was critical. Struggling with the poster’s layout and choice of type caused a mild letterpress obsession that led me straight into SVA’s printshop to research and photograph their extensive wood-type collection to use in future projects—that and to take my very first etching class finally. Yes, one thing leads to another.

Viktor Koen is an award-winning artist, designer, and chair of BFA Illustration and BFA Comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design in Jerusalem and an MFA in Illustration with honors from SVA. Clients include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Nature, The Economist, TIME, Bloomberg, Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, and the BBC. Regularly featured in books and publications, his prints and posters are exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide. He is a TED speaker and lectures for academic and professional institutions and conferences.

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