After a little encouragement from my boyfriend and my mum – the latter a surprisingly big Xtra Mile fan – I decided to try and come up with something to enter into the recent Xtra Mile poster competition. I am a graphic designer afterall, plus I hadn’t done much music-related design work in a while.
‘Calling all artsy XMR fans! We want you to design the special, limited edition, screen printed lithograph for Skinny Lister, Beans On Toast and Will Varley’s North American tour. We are looking for an unique and original piece of art for this special #XMRtour, happening in March and April of 2016. Anyone can submit a design. You are allowed to create whatever you see fit for this poster…’
I had an idea fairly quickly (using the Skinny Lister flagon) but spent a good few hours moving things about and changing colours. Entries for the competition closed on Friday so I didn’t feel too reluctant to share my design here… and now I’ve just found out that I won! I’m so pleased.
After dabbling in gig review writing (here and here), I've landed myself a weekly feature on Colin’s Punk Rock World. This is definitely all down to my writing ability and ideas rather than the fact I’m his girlfriend, obviously!
Every Tuesday I will be posting an article under the theme ‘The Art of Punk’. My first post went out earlier today and is a bit of an introduction to the whole concept, but also features London Calling by The Clash.
Alongside working on my own posts, I’ve also designed some banner-style images to head each blog post on CPRW – for each category: album reviews, gig reviews etc. These also appear down the side of the blog (see above!) and offer quick links to each category.
Last night dad and I went to see, American-alternative-indie-folk-band, The Decemberists play at Brixton Academy in London. They are a band that we have both been itching to see play live for several years now, but never had the opportunity to previously. We were seated upstairs in the circle – I’ve never been upstairs in Brixton Academy before – which meant we were by no means close to the stage. However, that didn’t matter one bit as we were directly in the centre and had a clear view of the stage, albeit at quite a distance, and the sound was perfect.
We knew they’d be great live, having seen a few videos of them playing in the past and having listened to their live album (which for a live album is actually really good – I say ‘actually’ because I’m not usually a fan of live albums). But I don’t think either of us expected them to be quite so incredibly good. I would definitely say that last night was up there with the best gigs I’ve ever been to. They don’t just play their songs, they perform them. I’d never really considered it before but they are a pretty theatrical band, in terms of the themes of their songs anyway.
This song, which was the [second] encore last night, pretty much sums up what I mean. (The Lego version is particularly good too!)
A lot of the songs that the band played last night were, unsurprisingly, from the latest album – What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World. The album came out in January and, although I’ve been listening to it on Spotify, I hadn’t actually bought a physical copy. Yet. So, I decided to splash out and buy the vinyl version last night. It’s a double LP, which is a first for me, and it is beautifully packaged.
Back in November last year I posted the video for Make You Better, the first single from WATWWABW, here on my blog. The kaleidoscopic-style imagery is taken from the album artwork (also featured in that blog). But now I can hold the beautiful vinyl packaging in my own hands – and listen to the record(s) of course, which I’m doing as I write this.
I particularly like the framing on the back.
I was quite surprised to find the image on the inside of the sleeve to be this way around.
The two inner sleeves, each a slightly different design.
As there aren’t actually enough songs on the album to fill four sides, only three, the fourth is simply a laser-etched design (not to be played! because that would end in tears).
I was listening to Band of Horses, one of my absolute favourite [non-punk] bands, on Spotify earlier and I happened to notice – not for the first time – the visual theme throughout all of their album covers. They use the same script font for their logo and place it over a photograph of the natural world in some shape or form. They each look great alone, but when you stick them all together…
Cease to Begin (below) is the least similar of the album covers, but it’s one I own on vinyl!
Even the Spotify Sessions artwork matches the theme!
And some single covers, as well.
I really like it when a band sticks to one visual identity for themselves from day one – if it’s a good identity anyway – even if it’s just a logo or typography choices. (I blogged about the album artwork of Hot Water Music not so long ago, most of which were created by one particular artist – and look awesome.)
Although, of course bands can do whatever they want with the artwork and it’s really down to the music to hook me. The Gaslight Anthem, for example, are one of my favourite bands, I would probably even say my most favourite, but their new album (yet to be released) artwork is just ugly.
Although unfortunately I don’t actually own physical copies of any of these albums (I only have Exister in CD form), I can still very much appreciate the interesting and unusual album artwork. Even if it is fairly small in iTunes/Spotify, I still noticed them. However, I’ve been listening to HWM for several years and it took until yesterday for me to look up who created the artwork… but I’m glad I did.
Scott Sinclair, or Sinc, is the man behind these intriguing album covers, as well as being an all round talented illustrator/artist – both digitally and traditionally. Plus, he’s a creative involved in the making of the video game Bioshock. Cool, huh?
Two things that are particularly striking to me: 1. The artwork reminds me of Picasso… and another artist that I can’t quite recall. 2. It’s really lovely that HWM chose one illustrator/designer/artist to create their album artwork for so many years. Although their last album cover, for Exister, is strikingly different to these – and not designed by Sinclair, which is a shame.
The Image Archiveon Sinclair’s website is really great.
Well, it was about time I got granddad’s old record player back up and running. Given that I’m partial to a bit of record sleeve design here and there, it makes sense that I have something to actually play them on. I mean, they’re obviously nice to look at and all but…
Here’s one I didn’t design…
Plus my nice friend Steve sent me [his copy of(!)] The Menzingers’ On The Impossible Past so that I wouldn’t have a crappy record for my first record. Freebies of records I’ve designed the sleeves for don’t really count. If more people gave away records from their own collection – or anything like that – to their friends, whom they know will really appreciate it, then the world would be a better place.
I took some photographs of the gatefold record sleeve I designed for Sarah Gillespie’s Glory Days. As always, you can see more of these and a bit more of a write up over on my website: go go go!
My latest record sleeve design – I say as if I’m a professional record sleeve designer, haha! (this is my fifth) – has been signed off and sent to the printers. The actual record, of which there will be 500 copies, is not due to be released until February but hopefully I can get my hands on my own copy before then. It’s a gatefold sleeve which is something I haven’t done before so I can’t wait to see it in the flesh.
Just the front of the sleeve (with sticker) to share for now.
I stumbled upon these amazing book covers based on best-selling albums yesterday at the Rough Trade record shop near the Old Truman Brewery, East London.
“The Record Books are cunningly fabricated trompe l'oeil pictures of well-thumbed but imaginary-books, whose titles derive from classic records, old and new. What started as a handful of doodles turned into a labour of love comprising over 100 carefully wrought images inspired by words from the world of music and visuals from the world of words.” – Rough Trade
The images are the genius creation of Christophe Gowans – his website is well worth a visit. There are so many great ‘book covers’ he’s designed but here are some of my favourites…
I received my copy of Peter Parker’s Rock n Roll Club’s ReVox Sessions a couple of weeks ago but I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to photograph (and actually take the record out of it’s wrapping) until today – Bank Holiday and all.
The painting on the front is by the band’s drummer, Sakura Mori.
If I had a festival and I split it into three different genres for three days, then picked ten of my favourite bands/artists for each day… this is what the line-up would look like.
I like a lot of bands so this was fairly easy, although I struggled with alternative/folk and rock more than punk rock. Punk could definitely have had at least double the amount of bands it does, as that’s generally what I listen to. Whilst rock has four bands that could arguably be the headliner – Muse have always been my all time favourite though so they win. Also, many would argue Neil Young should be above Arcade Fire but it’s my festival!
This has really just been a typography experiment of trying to match fonts to band names. Some are certainly better than others and there’s still more I could do with the actual design and composition of the posters but, hey, this was just for fun.
Also, I don’t have a better name for the actual festival…
Peter Parker’s Rock N Roll Club have a new LP coming out soon. It’s not so much a follow up to Straight to Vinyl but catalogues how the band formed and recorded their first songs together. This story is told on the back of the LP sleeve. The image on the front is a painting by Sakura, the band’s drummer, and of course I designed the back.
