Grateful Dead Debuts New Collab

Following the band's 50th anniversary, designer Darren Romanelli has commissioned artists and brands to reinvent the classic Steal Your face visual.

April 6, 2018

Designer Darren Romanelli reimagines the band's Steal Your face logo.

To re-engage fans with the Grateful Dead following the band's 50th anniversary, designer Darren Romanelli has commissioned select artists and brands to reinvent the classic Steal Your face visual.

Entitled Stolen Faces, the collaborative series kicks off with Romanelli’s own version, released through his line DRx. Serving as a visual invitation to the project, the DRx piece features the familiar Steal Your Face skull but with the lightning bolt removed, creating a blank canvas designed to encourage other participants' own graphic interpretations.

The first artist to participate is King Features' creative vice president Frank Caruso who has developed a new version of the logo to commemorate the “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years Of Grateful Dead” shows, held this past Fourth of July weekend in Chicago. This whimsical reworking incorporates another icon, King Features' own pop culture hero, Popeye.

“I wanted to invigorate the modern dialogue around the Dead and to push that conversation into

a new space,” says Romanelli. “The visual history of the Dead is so linked to the legacy of the band, and I wanted to allow artists to explore and pay tribute to that history, in a timeless manner.”