“I’m just still pretty stunned about the whole deal,” Ekiss, 50, told ABC News of her shocking new celebrity status online. Meet Gina Ekiss, the original artist of the masterful design who now lives a quiet life with her family in Aurora, Missouri. The creative genius behind the snazzy neon-colored logo, however, remained a mystery for the most part - until now. The retro design, appropriately called “Jazz,” has been immortalized on tons of fun merchandise from T-shirts to sneakers, bicycle helmets and nail art, to name just a few. He began with the five questions asked by mcglaven on Reddit.But 23 years after the cups were introduced, we can appreciate this gnarly nostalgic design for what it is: pure throwback perfection. He was able to track Gina down to Aurora, Illinois, and interview her for his story. One reply was from user pdschatz, who claimed to have been one of the original re-appropriators of the image on dump.fm the user claimed that he had emailed Solo Cup to find out more, and had learned that it was designed by a woman named Gina in 1991 in a design contest.įrom there, a journalist named Thomas Gounley picked up the search for a newspaper called the Springfield News-Leader, in Springfield Missouri, the region in which the cups were manufactured. Where were you in your career when you came up with this design? Did it hurt or help it?'

What does it feel like to have something you designed become a part of 90s culture that will be remembered for generations?ĥ. Did you anticipate how ubiquitous this image would become?ģ. Did you get paid well for your work? Did you get royalties?Ģ. On June 9th, 2015, reddit user mcglaven posted in /r/IAmA looking for the designer of the Solo Jazz pattern with five questions and claiming that Google searches had turned up nothing about their identity. Spread Reddit AMA Request and Springfield News-Leader Article In April of 2015, clothing company 1991Inc created a line of clothing featuring the pattern, which quickly sold out after being featured in notable blogs like those of the Laughing Squid and Pee Wee Herman. The earliest known mention of the cups on Reddit was an image post in the subreddit /r/nostalgia on November 14th, 2013, which received 86 points (93% upvoted). A Tumblr was created the same day, and posted continuously until October 2014.

A dedicated Facebook page was created on February 6th, 2012 as of June 2015, the page had more than 4,000 fans. These images spread across Tumblr and Reddit, often used in reference to nostalgia for the 1990s.

In 2012, users of the photo-sharing website dump.fm began re-appropriating the pattern and photoshopping it into different environments – some users estimate that over 100,000 different images using the pattern were created. The Solo Jazz pattern was created in the art department of the Sweetheart Cup Company in the early 1991 and began production across a variety of waxed paper products in 1992.

Paper cup design jazz