More lasered text

The letter forms, mentioned in the previous post, are probably clearer in this picture. (More variations of this to come.)

Immortal Melodies (dead)

I got around to lasering some other items today. I'll post more at some point. Anyway, I realised that the machinery's cutting funtion is different to the etching function in as much as the software traces the basic outlines of the jpeg. This also offered the option of altering the contours of the outlines. So I further simplified the serif stencil-friendly typeface I had used so that it was bolder and more 'custom'. You can see how it was used on the 'Immortal Melodies' 7" that finally had its date with destiny. The message reads "WHAT GOES AROUND".

Stanley Donwood in San Francisco

From: Creative Review
Date: 27/08/10
By: Eliza Williams


Link via Dave [thanks!]. The quote about how there 'doesn't have to be a product to buy' fits in nicely with where I'm currently at with the report.

Stanley Donwood, who is famed for the artworks he has created for Radiohead, is staging his first US exhibition from next week, at the Fifty24sf gallery in San Francisco...

The show, titled Over Normal, will include a series of paintings influenced by the vibrant colours he saw on a trip to California, and the contents of spam emails that he's received. Writing in a newspaper that he has created to accompany the exhibition, he says: "The work that would eventually become Over Normal started in California, and maybe it will end there. I found myself in the Golden State once, back in 2003, trying to make an artwork. I'd just arrived, and I was with a well-known 'rock' band who had decided that they were going to record an album in two weeks. Similarly I was supposed to produce the artwork in two weeks. Ho hum. It was the first time I had been to the west coast of America. It's an eerie place for a European; incredibly familiar from television and movies, inhabited by people who mostly speak the same language, but at the same time indefinably foreign. This foreign-ness, I thought, was at least partly to do with scale. Huge skies, huge buildings, huge highways, huge vehicles. Part of this massive scale involved the many advertising materials and traffic signage employed along the multi-lane highways that dissect the built environment.

"I was in the car with my notebook, and for something to do I was writing down what all those signs and advertisements had to say. I realised that they only used a very few colours and the colours were bold, brash, and used in very visually compelling combinations. I became convinced that about 90 per cent of the messages that flicked past my retinas were using just seven colours. I noted these colours down: red, green, blue, yellow, orange, black and white. All, I think, made from pigments derived from the petrochemical industry, the same hydrocarbon trade that has made the modern world, its complex and energy-hungry civilization, possible. I decided to paint using these colours, straight from the tub. There were all sorts of practical difficulties involving viscosity and opacity, but soon I had my palette, which I eventually referred to as the 'California palette'.

Donwood's studio, photographs by Ambrose Blimfield

Donwood used this palette in the artworks he created for Radiohead's album Hail To The Thief, and has used it in a number of projects since. The colours work well with the words from spam emails, another form of communication known for its shoutiness. Combined, they make striking, and noisy, paintings that are difficult to ignore. "These paintings are like some kind of weird, blatant advertising," writes Donwood in the newspaper, "advertising from a zone inside my head where words are enough and there doesn't need to be a product to buy."

The exhibition at Fifty24sf opens next Thursday, September 2, and will run until October 27. For those of you that can't make it to San Francisco though, Donwood has made the newspaper available to download from his site (where you'll also find his witty musings on blogging). Visit the site here.

Various Artists - MVSICA by Sawdust

From: Creative Review
Date: 10/02/10
By: Gavin Lucas


MVSICA – a limited edition CD compilation of down tempo music by various techno producers. Limited to just 200 copies, the package, designed by Sawdust and printed by Generation Press - comes with a plastic tiddlywink so you can (if you wish) scratch off the gold latex panels that cover all text on the CD pack...

"Because it's a down tempo compilation by purists within the techno genre, the packaging was designed to reflect that," explains designer Rob Gonzales. "It's aesthetically minimal throughout from cover to CD. There isn't even a disc tray within, only a button to keep the CD in place." Label: Fine Art Recordings

[Sawdust also did the Fabrice Lig packaging that was posted previously.]

No Logo?

From: City of Sound
Date: 16/02/05
By: Dan Hill

Colin Buttimer has always - quite rightly - picked me up when I talk about 'the playlist becoming the basic unit of music consumption', as opposed to the album, say. One of his concerns is around the loss of visual representation, or accompaniment perhaps, due the 'disembodied' experience of iPods, iTunes etc (those iTunes/Synergy graphics just aren't equivalent to the 12" album sleeve). This is another spin on notion that the metadata/context contained in the average jazz album, say, is disappearing in digital music experiences.

Tom Vanderbilt has now contributed an excellent piece over at Design Observer on the disappearance of the rock logo, and what this means in terms of identification with bands. Certainly, when I was at school, notebooks and those Army & Navy knapsacks were covered with logos. (The cool kids had the Madness, Two-Tone or PiL logos; I had Yes, Genesis, Marillion. Ahem.) What do kids do these days? There's some great comments at the end of Vanderbilt's piece - for instance Rick Poynor noting Franz Ferdinand's sharp visuals. (All cool kids, I note.)

But even those Franz Ferdinand visuals (and 'infographic music videos' I linked from that post) are principally situated in music promos. And therefore difficult to draw on your belongings. Difficult to physically 'mark your territory' and 'represent your self' with a music video. (For now. Let's not get into musical 'self' being articulated/swapped in other ways just yet - from RFID-swapping to wifi-based presence/sharing.) And physical embodiment is important.

Vanderbilt expands on what this might mean:

"The disappearing logo might just be the canary in the coal mine signifying the dematerialization of music. Sure, there are little JPEGs on iTunes that depict album covers, but the proliferation of digitally acquired music and the rise of "playlist culture" is a threat not only to the idea of an album as a coherent body of work, but the album (in CD or whatever form) as a package. The shift from album to CD represented meant the artist’s canvas was reducing in size to less than a quarter of its original, and now, to essentially nothing. My iPod is filled with songs by artists whose album covers I have never even seen, who I know only by iPod font, so I would not even know if they had a logo, or any visual identity whatsoever. A few months ago, a leading designer, who has done some exemplary record packaging, told me, “the music business at the moment is really not the business you would want to be in, neither as a musician or a designer. The medium is changing so incredibly, and nobody really knows if music packaging is really going to be around in a few years.” When I asked an art director at a record company what the future of album cover design was, his answer was simple: “It’s disappearing. That’s what the future is ... And the covers of kids notebooks — what do they hold now? What will they hold tomorrow? Maybe it would be better if they were not drawing logos. My Middle School grades were terrible."

Design Observer: The Rise and Fall of Rock and Roll Graphic Design

Posted by Dan Hill in Design history, Graphic Design, Music

Comments

Matt said...

Hey i just found an interesting visual representation and community use by a band. The scottish (?) band m.A.s.S have set themselves up as a user on flickr, where they are posting concert photos etc. Would be great so be able to glue a visual stream with a stream of music...

Reply February 16, 2005 at 09:38 PM

Andrew said...

"...the music business at the moment is really not the business you would want to be in, neither as a musician or a designer. The medium is changing so incredibly, and nobody really knows if music packaging is really going to be around in a few years."

That quote should be interpreted as: you don't want to be in the music business if you're a musician or designer who's incapable or uninterested in new forms of style, new innovations, and new ways to make and sell your craft.

"Music packaging" is certainly not going away. It might not continue to soley take the form of cardboard sleeves or plastic boxes, but visual identities, videos, graphic advertisting, collateral visual materials, and of course websites will all still be around and offer plenty of work to do.

My embarassing logo past: carefully drawing the "Dio" logo to learn how it could read "Devil" when turned upside down. Whoa.

Reply February 17, 2005 at 02:28 AM

neils said...

I do confess to having a soft spot for the Yes logo, I apparently wouldn't have been one of the cool kids at your school either Dan. As I type I can look over at my bookcase and see my 2 Roger Dean books sitting on the bookshelf happiliy alongside books by "cooler" design figures.

I think one of the best band logos from recent years is Blur, who have mostly stuck by their's for the last 15 years or so.

Reply February 19, 2005 at 05:12 PM

Colin said...

Hello Dan,

Trying to be brief, but failing miserably – sorry - my issues are as follows:

- Is there any empirical evidence about the playlist becoming dominant? I'd be interested to read some studies if you know of any.

- Impact of digitising music upon the medium - as you and others note it seems that all the valuable metadata about music that helped so many people like me to make connections to other music (who played, who produced, who designed the artwork, who got thanked – okay, the loss of that last one won’t be mourned by many...) hasn’t found its way into the comments section of mp3 files or anywhere else. Even if it did, the iTunes interface doesn’t make it particularly friendly to access. But it could! I’d love to see someone rig up an add on for iTunes that displayed all that info – isn’t that doable? Couldn’t even, say, Synergy display that as a lovely semi-transparent overlay?

- You also mentioned the loss of artwork, but I wanted to restate my frustration that the proximity of significant amounts of processing power to mp3 playing applications hasn’t resulted in any enhancement of the visual aspect of music, but instead an almost total depletion. I’m kind of hopeful that somebody will bridge the digital gap between the musical and visual in some way. I still treasure my Basic Channel tins, my Rune Grammofon digipaks and my Spekk covers. My powerbook desktop cycles through scans of Intro’s Primal Scream/Xtrmntr cover, Designers Republic’s cover for Autechre’s LP5, Mati Klarwein’s Inscape painting for Jon Hassell’s Aka Darbari Java, the excellent promo photo for Wibutee downloadable from their site, etc, etc. Perhaps it’s just that visuals need a new, parallel outlet? Some will say that music is music, that shedding its visual skin makes for a less muddied experience, I couldn’t agree less, which leads me onto my next point:

- The impact of shuffle culture - it’s great in some respects – I’ve used the random play to refresh my experience of individual albums for years – but I’m interested in the affectlessness of hearing music without association. I have a 6cd player in my car and fairly often forget what cds I’ve loaded. To my surprise I’ve often found that if I can’t place the music I’m listening to, I find it less rather than more enjoyable. The music is effectively heard afresh, but the effect is of denuding it, removing its associative subtlety, its layers of memory, visual presentation, context and so on. The album is an institution – and therefore begging to be given a good shake I’m sure - but an overemphasis upon its redundancy mitigates against an appreciation of its rarely-realised potential. The length of an album apportions space/time for contemplation of it as creative enterprise. The brevity of a single track permits a concommitantly briefer period of deliberation. What I’m probably rather pompously saying is that the random compilation encourages the experience of music as quick hit – which is great, no problem – but to ignore the album as a separate form is a shame. Ultimately, however, I believe it’s a case of ebb and flow the two will come to co-exist peacefully enough.

As an aside, I’ve been an iTunes user since its arrival, but only recently swapped my Sony Clie with a 512mb stick for a 60gb iPod. I was really surprised at the inconsistency between the two interfaces as detailed in my two posts here:
http://www.eleventhvolume.com/miscellany/2005/01/ipod-photo-60gb-first-impressions.htm
http://www.eleventhvolume.com/miscellany/2005/02/ipod-second-impressions.htm

PS It was mainly John Foxx, Tubeway Army and Japan on my Adidas bags, but Zep (Zofo) was there too and I did end up seeing Marillion at least three times in my teens (Forgotten Sons, sigh, I feel all nostalgic suddenly...)

I think I should shut up now. Cheers, Colin.

Reply February 20, 2005 at 04:32 AM

Matthew said...

In NYC I'm part of the evil empire know as the music business (cue death star music) and I work in the digital part of the business. I can tell you that the biggest place we see growth in terms of images and visuals attached to music is indeed logos, with packaging materials, reconfigured, as a close second.

The logo for Nas (one of the acts at Columbia) is distinctive, as is the AC DC logo and thus perfect for using as an image for your cellphone wallpaper. Not surprisingly, we're trying to sell them. I have mixed feelings about this, as you can imagine.

But the biggest discussion, particularly over at Legacy, our catalog marketing label (think the Clash, think Bob Dylan, think Bruce Springsteen) is the concept of the digital box set. Traditionally, the re-issue or the box set is an exercise in deep mining. You go back to the vaults and to the archives to get the interesting effluvia and ephemera: papers from the recording sessions, photos snapped in studio or on tour, etc.

Once again, the rights issue raises its ugly head. There is only one group more protectiveof copyright than the record business and that's photographers. Where we have been rapacious in our desire to control the masters of an artist, photography rights and the connected "image and likeness" rights are more convoluted as in addition to being greedy, we were very cheap and rarely paid the expensive fees asked by photographers to get all rights instead of a limited set around promotion of the record. So now all those excellent photos that we commissioned are in some photographer's vault and hard to unlock. In many cases, the images are quite literally rotting away (Motown comes to mind) in a file cabinet somewhere at the label.

But I digress.

I think more bands will take the time to do distinctive digital logos (for both the band and for each album) once there is a stronger market for them, be it promotional or even commercial sales. But more interesting will be the packaging that goes with it. I can see a real combination of physical and digital coming soon. Booklets like the limited edition radiohead mapset for Hail to the Theif or the beautiful limited edition REM photo books.

Let's just hope that the record companies don't kill them before they get out the gate.

Reply February 21, 2005 at 02:20 AM

jamesb said...

I love Matt's idea about bands becoming more involved in their aesthetic and having a stream of their images playing with their music. A kind of ultra basic pop video [strange how new tech can deliver compelling old tech experiences]. It would create a closer relationship between the band of the listener/fan.

At risk of this becoming some sad 'back to school' thread I was mostly adorning a Fall badge [the circular dashes - Bend Sinister] and an all too predictable Smiths badge with a back felt-tip homage to the Clash. The Fall particularly have an interesting history to their art work and is fundamental in their overall approach to their music. Not being aware of their artwork would definitely have taken something away from my 'relationship' with the band and the music. It was so different.

Reply March 02, 2005 at 03:07 AM

Folkways

From: Creative Review

Date: 22/03/10
By: Mark Sinclair

Unit Editions' first newsprint publication unearths a selection of covers that Ronald Clyne designed for esoteric US record label, Folkways. The work, and the story of the label's almost sacred mission, make for a compelling read...

Clyne, who died in 2006, made over 500 sleeves for the Folkways label, which was founded by Polish-born Moses 'Moe' Asch in New York in 1948. Under Asch's direction, the label evolved into a fascinating repository for field recordings, spoken word, poetry and indigenous compositions.

The label helped to bring native folk traditions to a wider public and recorded, among others, Lead Belly, Burt Ives, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Bob Dylan was also a fan of the label's output and recalls his early ambitions to record for the label, as a natural home for his music, in the first part of his Chronicles autobiography.

In one of two essays bookending the Unit Editions collection, Adrian Shaughnessy suggests that Folkways had the characteristics of "a social enterprise", that it was almost "a non-for-profit organisation." Clearly not in the business for financial gain, the scale of "musical bio-diversity" that Asch presented through his label is incredible.

There are the songs of the Ulster Orangemen and collections of Catalonian folk artists; psalms from Cameroon and modernist poetry from Charles Olson. Sir Edmund Hillary's reminiscences of his mountaineering campaigns even made it onto vinyl – one of over 2,000 albums that emerged from the label.

If Folkways had a remit it was, as Asch himself put it, "Anything that is sound, from Indonesian folk music to James Joyce reading his own poetry."

Yet however diverse and appealing Folkways' subject matter was, Clyne's creative work for the label has largely been ignored by design history. From the 1950s to the 1980s he designed hundreds of covers, working on sleeves for many of the recordings by electronic, avant-garde and jazz artists, in addition to the label's folk releases.

Clyne was apparently an avid collector of art from New Guinea and Vanuatu and many references to ethnic art and design feature on his sleeves. Indeed, all of his cover designs have, says Shaughnessy, "an unpretentious, unselfconscious graphic purity" that make great use of two-colour printing on matt paper.

This production process was in part an economic strategy, but one that became an integral aspect of Clyne's approach which remained un-showy, understated and, like the Folkways sound itself, authentic throughout.


Unit: Design/Research 01 – Ronald Clyne at Folkways is available now (£7.50 including p&p) from uniteditions.com. Editors: Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy. Design: David McFarline and Claudia Klat at Spin. Project co-ordinator: Natasha Day for Unit Editions.

In 1987, in accordance with his wishes, Moe Asch's family transferred the Folkways label to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, with the proviso that all 2,168 albums remain in print in perpetuity. (A quick search and I've already got some "Tuvan multiphonic throat singing" bookmarked). There is also a filmed interview with Clyne at the Smithsonian Institution site here, and more on Moe Asch at Ralph Rinzler's Folklife Archives and Collections website, here.

Apple Pips work by Give Up Art

With work for the likes of FWD>>, Tempa, Skream, Benga and Rinse FM, the duo behind Give Up Art has pretty much defined a clean and tight dubstep/post-dubstep aesthetic. Below is their identity for Bristol's excellent Apple Pips label with a colour-coded release strategy that, again, aids its collectability. Nice die-cut touches too.

MIMEO - Lifting Concrete Lightly by Bravo Charlie Mike Hotel

From http://www.bcmh.co.uk/

"As part of a wider commission for the Serpentine Gallery we were asked to design the identity for a new record label called Sound at the Serpentine that the gallery was launched with Lifting Concrete Lightly by MIMEO as its first release. MIMEO (Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra) is an ensemble of 12 of EuropeÍs leading electronic music specialists including Kaffe Matthews and Christian Fennesz.

The album is a 3-hour recording of a unique performance in the Oscar Niemeyer pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery when the group used a range of instruments and the architectural environment to produce the work. Taking a physical and instinctive approach to digital music in their performance we decided to embrace a similar spirit in the design by having the CD engraved with the group's name and then photographed for the album's cover."

Unkle - Where Did The Night Fall by Ben Drury

Ltd. edition packaging for Unkle's fifth album Where Did The Night Fall designed by Ben Drury. I'm probably being a bit pedantic by wondering where the question mark is but, aside from that, I like the previously assumed incongruous fusion of the luxe metallic finish and erotic-themed photography with a font that appears informed by graffiti/tagging. It balances it out nicely so that it doesn't become too much of one particular thing: with sensual imagery coupled with hard-edged qualities plus 'street' elements that are restrained enough to remain sophisticated.

Portishead - Third by Marc Bessant

Originally documented at: Sleevage.com


Designer Marc Bessant:

“After the ten year gap from the last record I knew the only visual which had stuck in the public eye had been the ‘P’ character, it was an established brand which I wanted to not only reintroduce but reinforce. We were keen to avoid anything ‘conceptual’, no puns or noir imagery, that was all dead to us, I wanted to present a box, which simply holds the music, with the least amount of information on it which would ultimately say everything – essential minimalism – which I felt captured the Eastern Bloc coldness of some of the music I was hearing in the studio.”

Tom Hingston Studio: Visualising Music

Another interview with Tom Hingston although this one specifically asks him about his process when designing for music. I've posted some of his work at the bottom too although I couldn't find decent resolution images of some of my own personal favourites. I may have to dig those out to scan or photograph.

From: Pingmag

Date: 03/09/08

If you ask graphic designers how they got into graphics in the first place, a lot of them will tell you about their favourite album covers or something else visually related to music. Enter London-based Tom Hingston: For over ten years, he has been designing quite a lot for music, from flyers for the legendary Blue Note club to Massive Attack’s covers. So for today, PingMag asks Tom about visualising sounds.

Written by Chiemi

Tom, how did you get involved with music projects?

In the mid 90’s, I started out designing flyers for the Blue Note club in London’s Hoxton Square. Through the club, I met a lot of really talented people — DJs, promoters and producers who went on to start up their own clubs or record labels and asked me to be involved. I guess it kind of grew from there really.

Did you set up your own studio straight after that?

No, I had a full-time job working for Neville Brody at the time. And I was designing the club artwork in my evenings and spare time. As the club blossomed, the more the workload increased and what started off as two, or maybe three flyers a week became ten or fifteen different bits of artwork, and slowly it was becoming a full time job in itself. So something had to give — either the freelancing or my job. I made the decision to set up on my own.

Okay… We know that by now you do all kinds of work, but for today, we’d like to focus on your designs for music. How do you visualise it? Any tips?

An open-minded approach is key to each project. This is underpinned through a process of research which will then help us shape and define our ideas. Collaboration has always formed a fundamental part of our approach as well, over the years we’ve worked with some of the best photographers and image makers in order to realise our vision.

Creating what, for example?

With Massive Attack’s “Collected,” we needed to find a symbol that encapsulated or conveyed the emotions and ideals of the band. With it being a “Best of,” a more obvious route would have been to utilise their trademark flame in some way. So instead we thought, a nicer way to approach the cover was to adopt a technique that we’d used before on their other album “Mezzanine:” a collage or composite of different elements, but applied to a new set of images. Working with Nick Knight, we took a still life of roses as the core element and introduced other layers over the top. When you first look at the rose, you see this very beautiful flower, or group of flowers. However on closer inspection, all these other hidden layers are revealed.

The working relationship we’ve established with Massive Attack is quite different to that we have with any other artist or band; it’s quite an organic process that takes place.

What means “organic process” exactly with them?

Robert from Massive Attack will come up with themes or words that are applicable to that project or that piece of music, and between him, Nick and I. We’ll gradually forge how the thing will look. We’ll push and pull each other in different directions until we end up in a place we’re all happy with.

A very ideal designing process! Any other favourite artists to work with?

Gnarls Barkley has been a great act to work with. With “St. Elsewhere,” the band were adamant that they didn’t want to be on the front cover – which is great because it opens you up to endless possibilities. Their initial references to us were early psychedelia, a lot of that West Coast imagery from the late 60’s, early 70’s. I’ve got a few books on Cuban posters from a similar era — not the political ones, which is what most people know of Cuban imagery –, but all the early cinema posters which are a lot more psychedelic. And the band were really supportive. They saw those early references and just allowed us to go ahead, which is great to have that level of trust from an artist.

What is most important when designing for music?

For us, it’s important that the design captures the tone and mood of a record but also becomes an expression of our own personal ideas and inspirations at that particular time.

What is a good design for music?

To create something that’s both unique and beautiful.

And what would be a good album cover?

The Beatles’ The White Album and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here are two of my favourite album covers.

Good choice! Those are masterpiece for both music and design! Finally, what is the greatest thing to design for music?

When you’re designing for an artist whom you really respect and admire — that’s exciting. We’ve always tried to design for music we really like, and that’s what makes the project both inspiring and enjoyable.