One insane music video this one – flashes of tron meets alice in wonderland meets flash gordon. It’s trippy as hell. The music is produced by Justice and the video’s done done by a whole load of cool people:
Will Sweeney - Concept designer and Illustrator...
Birdy Nam Nam – The Parachute Ending Music Video
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Sam Dunn – Illustrator and designer
Sam Dunn does some pretty sick looking designs. I’ve featured her work before in the post about Holy Roar Records and it was her comment on that post that saw me flicking through her own work with a certain green eyed jealousy at her illustration skills. Her style would fit well with a design agency like Go Media but with a British rather than American take on things.
More posters and T-shirt designs by Sam Dunn
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Portugal. The Man – The Satanic Satanist.
Portugal. The Mans’ new artwork is a labour of love and it shows. Designed by Austin Sellers and cut from a single sheet of card.
This artwork came together much the same as the album, lots of hard work and lots of fun. It was really great sitting down with Austin again and getting his thoughts on where the illustrations should go and seeing what he would do with the colors in the end. He really ran with this project and as we speak is still running with it as far as vinyl package and posters and stickers go. He did a truly amazing job in making sure things lined up and worked with every fold. I remember our initial talk and the initial sketch of what would become the package. Austin’s response was something along the lines of “There is no way they will let us do this.” and “You’re going to make me do all this work just to get turned down!”. It took a lot of thought to bring this together as smoothly as it has come. Austin did some really great work with this layout and color placement, there is no way it could have worked without him.
The idea was to make a package out of one solid cut, no plastic. More than anything we wanted to give the buyer something more substantial, a package that could double as a piece of art and not just be a marketable image ready to be tossed upon transfer of music to computer to MP3 player or internet for download (please share once you buy, that is how us little bands grow and how the bigger bands get bigger still.). You may not be able to see it from these rough, ROUGH small scale, handcut package photos but the CD, once transferred to computer to MP3 or internet for download, is also a part of the artwork. The sun. The template is meant to be a mountain that folds down into smaller mountains, much like the mountains that run around our home state and the illustrations are meant to represent the years of my childhood that the album was written through, 1987-93. The years my family moved around the state the most as well as the years I was introduced to films like Lightyears, Fantastic Planet, Fire and Ice and Wizards. Safe bet that those films may have ruined my growing mind.
This outlook is very refreshing in an industry that so often treats the artwork as just another cost in the marketing campaign. Creating a product that cannot be downloaded is also a key way of insuring that fans buy your product and don’t just steal it.
Click to see the Portugal. The Man artwork unfolded...
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Young Widows – Old Wounds (Reader rec.)
Steve Rose contacted me to say I should be checking out the artwork for the Young Widows’ album Old Wounds. As you can see it’s a pretty trippy hand illustrated and painted skull heavily influenced by tribal face paint and Mexican wrestling masks. It’s illustrated by David Cook and the rest of his illustrative work, although not band related, is well worth checking out. He seems to be a favourite among guys looking for very distinctive, very cool tattoos.
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Antony and the Johnsons – Epilepsy Is Dancing (Single Cover) & Video
This is such a bleak and traumatic image. The woman’s face appears so pained and the addition of hand drawn angular illustration accentuates the anguish by obscuring parts of the woman’s face distorting her features into an even more pained expression. I love it.
Click to see the video for Epilepsy Is Dancing
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Youves’ artwork more awesome than previously thought
I included the Youves’ artwork in my assessment/roundup of the Holy Roar Records artwork but it’s even better than I realised from the single panel illustration.
See the outer cover...
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Record labels that ooze style – Holy Roar Records
Holy Roar Records are one of my favourite independent record labels in the UK. The music they release is of a consistently high quality and although the artwork wasn’t consistent at the very start they’ve completely upped their game and now release some of the most visually arresting as well as sonically interesting vinyl, cds and tapes of any label in the world. They’ve allied themselves with some very talented designers/illustrators that insure a high quality output every time.
Releases from Rolo Tomassi, Youves, Cutting Pink With Knives, Maths etc...
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Record labels that ooze style – Fool House
There is a treasure trove of small labels across the world who put out great music that isn’t considered financially viable enough for major labels. Great music that has a niche audience of a few thousand (and maybe more – majors generally aren’t interested if the band don’t have the potential to shift 10s of thousands of units). The labels often work closely with artists and designers to produce spectacular results. My friends and I refer to it as the “factory model”, as I’m sure many others do, based on the work on Factory Records. They started small and worked closely with designers such as Peter Saville (who defined the label visually from the very beginning). They were more than a record label, Factory Records produced concepts that helped define a generation, not only of Mancunians but of many Brits as well. A good record label can revolutionise.
See the artwork for 33Hz, Mondkopf...
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Died Young, Stayed Pretty – Eileen Yaghoobian
I just got word of this amazing looking film about poster design and the counter-culture that’s associated with it. It’s directed by Iranian born Canadian film maker Eileen Yaghoobian and her film focuses on the subversive culture of rock posters in North America and the unique characters that design them.
Their art subverts popular American Culture; taking little pieces and rebuilding into controversial, often obscene, frequently vulgar but always strikingly beautiful poster designs that on the face tell you when a band is playing but with closer inspection reveal very different messages. The artists and designers are as idiosyncratic as their work. I can’t think of another film that focuses in this much detail on the visual elements of the scene and not just the music.
Click for more info and to see the Died Young, Stayed Pretty trailer...
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Cool Gig and Show Flyers
A quick squint at flickr with the key words “gig flyer” brings up some truly awful examples of the medium. True examples, if any were needed, to justify the phrase “just because you own [insert Adobe product name here] it doesn’t make you a designer”. However dig deeper and there are some gems; triumphs of layout, masters of colouring & illustrators extraordinaire. Above there is a wonderful example of a club flyer for a Luke Vibert show – cool because he’s one of my favourite electronic artists and after nearly 2 years of knowing someone I discovered Luke was his brother. The flyer features a hand drawn (modified) version of TheSerif in a heavy weight (correct me if I’m wrong) which works beautifully with the frankly bizarre illustration and other hand drawn elements. The light shade of sky blue and baby pink are always a winning combination. More Cool Flyers...
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Bands & Design