Hasta La Ideas

The clever people at Blast Radius, in collaboration with UK illustrator and facial hair connoisseur Simon Cook of Made In England, have put together Stachetag.com (or alternatively Tachetag for the Brits/Aussies)—a brilliant little live feed of Movember mug-shots uploaded to Twitter to show their support of this year’s Movember men’s health month.

Apparently, the inspiration for the site came from a chance stuttering mix-up of the words “hash tag”.

Get online and get social with your mo!

(more…)

In redesigning the logo for Norton motorcycles, Carter Wong looked to the brand’s heritage for inspiration. The result takes the best elements from the many versions of an identity that Norton bikes have sported since 1915…

The Norton Commando 961SE, complete with the new identity by Carter Wong

The Norton Company was founded in 1898 by James Lansdowne Norton. Norton also designed the company’s inaugural logo, which didn’t actually appear until the 1913 catalogue and on bikes until 1915. Company legend has it that the identity was created at the family dining room table with help from his eldest daughter, Ethel. The “curly N” logo has since been redrawn, adapted and embellished upon on numerous occasions.

It was design studio Carter Wong‘s belief that their work should result in a subtle shift from the existing logo where some careful detailing would, they say, “retain all the positive and ownable assets of the logo as it stood, but do away with the awkward shapes, nuances and curves that had appeared over time.” Carter Wong were aided in the redesign of the identity by master typographer Geoff Halpin.

Norton motorcycles’ new logo

“On a project such as this, looking back is always a sound place to start moving forward, and this proved a true revelation to us on a number of scores,” says Carter Wong’s Phil Carter. “The first was our initial idea of doing away with the double crossing of the “t” as we thought that the one provided by the dynamic swoosh should prove sufficient.”

Norton logo iterations through the ages, 1907-2009

It was only when researching the development of the original logo that Carter Wong realised that in their own redesigns they were honouring the very first configuration of the identity, designed by Norton and his daughter.

By 1924, however, the double crossed “t” had made an appearance, possibly so the letter would not be mistaken for an “l’. Further enquiries into the company’s heritage brought up other elements that Carter Wong thought should be readdressed.

“The two ‘o’s had an element of speed to them, both leaning at an angle to create this illusion,” says Carter. “It was only after manipulating these shapes that the correct amount of motion was achieved by turning the counters only – the inside shapes – rather than the whole letterform. By doing this we created the element of tension as in the original, just where these ‘tyres’ would touch the surface.”

Other minor changes included creating a more voluptuous and dynamic swoosh and various tweaks of serifs and spaces to create a balanced logo with a distinct nod to the company’s long heritage.

Sketches from Carter Wong’s work on the Norton identity

Designer, artist, writer: Scott King defies easy or lazy categorisation. A new book, Scott King: Art Works covers the full range of his output from 1992 to the present. For the November issue of CR, Rick Poynor took a look inside

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A new book reveals some of the secrets behind Penguin’s cover designs by including candid interviews with both designers and authors. We have five extracts from the book that shed light on the particular ins and outs of creating the perfect cover…

To coincide with Penguin’s 75th anniversary this year Paul Buckley, the publisher’s US art director, chose 75 book covers that represent the best work produced by the company over the last decade. The result is Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (the Good, the Bad…).

Offering readers a glimpse into the design of a book’s cover (not to mention the ensuing arguments) one of the best things about the collection is that each cover boasts a fairly candid commentary from authors, agents and editors, as well as the designers, art directors and artists involved in its creation.

Some anecdotes are highly amusing – see author Garrison Keillor’s bemused dismissal of the cover for his book Love Me, below – while others show how ideas are arrived at in a unique, and frequently convivial, collaboration between art director, designer and author.

The first of five exclusive extracts from the book tells the story behind the cover for Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does It Feel To Be A Problem? (original spread from the Penguin 75 book, shown below).

How Does It Feel to Be A Problem?

Author: Moustafa Bayoumi. Designer: Jon Gray. Art Director: Darren Haggar. Editor: Vanessa Mobley

Darren Haggar, Art Director:

One of the many beige covers that didn’t get approved in paperback. This was originally meant to be a total repackage from the hardcover, but nothing seemed to work. After months of pursuing alternative ideas – even commissioning a photo shoot (which I thought went really well) – I like to think the publisher took pity on me and went back to the hardcover design, tweaking the colors (removing the beige).

Moustafa Bayoumi, Author:

At first, the Arabic was all wrong. Needless to say, it didn’t endear me to the design. The text on the cover read from left to right, but Arabic is written from right to left. Arabic is cursive, as if the letters are holding hands in a chain, but here the letters were all separated, like lonely people afraid even to look at each other. And it took a while to realise this was supposed to be my book’s title in my mother tongue. The translation was entirely literal, the equivalent of the bad English found on signs in distant countries: Please don’t leave your values unattended.

I consulted with my father. We corrected the Arabic, but other reservations persisted. The cover looked to me like a 1960s manifesto, while my book was about real people whose stories of struggle had been drowned out by the noise of ideology. The flag imagery of the cover seemed to pit American against Arab, contrary, I thought, to the complexities of my book. I felt like I was fighting with the cover, and losing.

A few months later, I changed my mind. One afternoon, I was speaking to a group of Christian ministers who had kindly invited me into their conversation about discrimination in America. One minister told me how much she liked my book before telling everyone that she had a confession to make. The Arabic on the cover, she said, had made her nervous when reading in public. She knew it was shameful, but she covered up the Arabic whenever she read the book outside her house. The cover, she admitted, helped her recognise the depths of her own fears and prejudices. That’s the moment I realised that this bold and powerful cover beautifully mirrors the aims of the pages within.

Jon Gray, Designer:

From the outset this seemed like a sensitive and tricky subject. So much so, that even writing about it now feels tricky. How do you grab attention without offending anyone? The title is great and also needed to be fairly prominent. Best solution seemed to be something typographic. So with the help of a free internet translator, I got to work. I thought of the most offensive phrase I could, then plastered it across the cover in Arabic! Genius right? Relax, Penguin, I had it checked.

The Brontë Sisters

Authors: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë. Designer: Kelly Blair. Cover Artist: Unknown. Art Director: Roseanne Serra. Editor: Elda Rotor.

Roseanne Serra, Art Director:

When dealing with our more special Penguin Classics, we are always thinking of how to create a special package. It has to be gorgeous, gifty, something you just have to have for its sheer beauty. I worked with Kelly Blair on Jane Austen: The Complete Novels. I wanted a gorgeous period piece that was also contemporary. In the end, the black silhouette of the tree gave the cover that darkness it needed without being depressing and took a traditional old painting and gave it new life.

Kelly Blair, Designer:

For me, this was one of those magic jobs where everyone was in agreement right from the beginning. This cover is one of the first ideas I sent in to Roseanne, and it was decided upon very quickly. It was my favourite as well. I love that the full cover speaks to the three authors as well as the mood and place of the novels. I look forward to hearing how the Brontë sisters feel about the cover.

Juliette Wells, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Manhattan College:

Three sisters, each prodigiously talented but far from conventionally beautiful, are screened from the public world by pen names. Isolated together, they create works of fierce imagination side by side, in a gloomy house abutting the natural world, where they found solace and inspiration. Their originality is acclaimed and despised in equal measure by their contemporaries, who feared such passion in young women. Knowing how soon the shadow of death would fall on them all, who would not prefer to imagine the sisters as portrayed here: a trio of lovely women whose gaze speaks of genius.

The First Word

Author: Christine Kenneally. Designer: Greg Mollica. Illustrator: Nicholas Blechman. Art Director: Paul Buckley
Editor: Rick Kot

Paul Buckley, Art Director:

It’s subtlety that is often the hardest to come by, and the most difficult to explain. When it comes to summing up a written premise with a quick visual, Nicholas [Blechman] is as smart as they come. This is just the sort of execution that someone unfamiliar with our industry might see and think, what’s the big deal? I could do that. They couldn’t, but the fact that some might see this drawing as being that simple is exactly what makes it so brilliant.

Christine Kenneally, Author:

I didn’t know what a good cover for The First Word would look like, but I knew what it wouldn’t look like. “Please,” I asked my editor, Rick Kot, “could we not have a chimpanzee or a mouth.” Typically, books about human evolution have a chimpanzee or two gazing meaningfully at the camera, and many books to do with language have mouths. Not lipsticked, lush, irresistible lips but normal human mouths, open wide, lips drawn, speaking. These covers are particularly resistible. Instead, he sent me this cover. “Wow,” I thought, “I want to buy this book.” So did the hundred or so people who came to me after the book was published and said, “The First Word? Oh yeah, I saw it in the store. That’s the book with the fantastic cover.”

Nicholas Blechman, Illustrator:

The original title of this book was From Screech to Sonnet. I tried to make an association between something primeval (a SCREECH) and something sophisticated (a SONNET). Because the book was about the history of language, all my sketches involved lettering: a crudely rendered A transforming into an elegant A. Then I started playing with the cliché diagram of evolution (a fish turning into a mammal, turning into an ape, turning into a neanderthal, etc.) and hit upon this idea of a monkey morphing into an A. The idea was just a black and white sketch, drawn on a long flight to Japan, but Greg Mollica turned it into a beautiful cover.

Love Me

Author: Garrison Keillor. Designer | Illustrator: Jamie Keenan. Art Director: Roseanne Serra. Editor: Molly Stern

Jamie Keenan, Designer/Illustrator:

I spent ages trying to put this idea together using different photographs of New York skyscrapers. They all had slightly different perspectives, and trying to get them to work together was a nightmare – it looked terrible. Then I noticed my original scribble. The original scribble
is always best.

Garrison Keillor, Author:

This cover gives me a bad case of the yips. Love Me is a comic novel in which the protagonist, Larry, comes to New York and realises his great dream of working at The New Yorker and, in a moment of great courage, he shoots the publisher in the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel and returns to his beloved wife, Iris, in St. Paul. The cover doesn’t suggest any of that. At first glance, it looks like oak beams drying at the lumberyard, or a bad dream about coffins, or a child’s rendering of an aerial view of Dupont Circle, or an explosion at Legoland. It doesn’t suggest anything that is in the book.

Maybe it was designed for the Penguin edition of The Trial by Franz Kafka, and Kafka didn’t like it so they stuck me with it. Anyway, it could’ve been worse, as we say. It could’ve been fruit bats hanging from bare knobby limbs or a colour photo of suppurating bedsores. So I bear no ill will, even though Love Me only reached 234,851 on Amazon’s fiction list and the book was quickly remaindered and sold almost a thousand copies at 59 cents and the rest were baled up and hauled to a recycling plant. I still have a copy and I enjoy reading it very much. It’s a funny book, though you’d never know it from this.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

Author: Kim Edwards. Designer: Greg Mollica. Photographer: Liz Magic Laser. Art Director: Paul Buckley. Editor: Pamela Dorman

Kim Edwards, Author:

The cover for The Memory Keeper’s Daughter arrived by e-mail attachment, the delicate white dress floating against the dark background, snowflakes drifting faintly, evoking a sense of loss and mystery. I loved it immediately – the visual allusion to the metaphor of photography, the haunting image of an empty dress. Readers loved it, too, around the country and around the world. A bookstore in Houston replicated the cover to fill their storefront window; in a train station in Italy, I stood next to a poster reproduction nearly as tall as I am. Everywhere I went on tour, readers spoke about this cover’s subtle power, its beauty.

Greg Mollica, Designer:

On my way to Penguin one morning, during the height of The Memory Keeper’s phenomenal popularity, I counted five people reading the book in my subway car alone. As a cover designer, it’s always nice to see your covers out there in the world, but five?! Hallucination due to sleep deprivation was the only explanation. Never did I think the white floating dress would become such an icon. Thanks to Kim Edwards’s beautiful, arresting story, it did – and it’s still front and centre at every bookstore.

Paul Buckley, Art Director:

There is a big difference working on the cover for a book with massive expectations. While we knew this was going to do very well, we did not know it was going to do this well. It became absolutely huge. I have one editor who likes to say to me about certain titles, “Paul, I’m telling you right now – THIS ONE is going to be very very very difficult to nail.” Translation: I’ll need to see a hundred cover comps, and I’m not picking one till UPS is banging on the door. One might as well add, “And don’t go being brilliant right out of the gate cause I’m not gonna bite for a few months yet.”

Luckily, we did not hear any statements like this during the creation of this jacket, which is why I think we entertained Greg’s saying, “Let’s do a photoshoot for this one,” and Greg and Liz saying, “Yeah, an empty dress just floating over a snowy scene.” What a memorable jacket.

Thanks for Andrew Lau at Penguin for organising the extracts for us. Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (the Good, the Bad…) is “a unique exploration into the suble art of the book cover”, edited by Paul Buckley and featuring a foreword by Chris Ware. Designed by Chris Brand, cover by Paul Buckley. More details at the Penguin Covers microsite at penguinbooks75.com.

The book features contributions by Paul Auster · Tara McPherson · Daniel Clowes · David Byrne · Elizabeth Gilbert · Joe Sacco · Tana French · T.C. Boyle · Seth · Tom Gauld · William T. Vollmann · Art Spiegelman · Kim Edwards · Melissa Bank · Ruben Toledo · Tomer Hanuka · Jamie Keenan · Roz Chast · Garrison Keillor · Yoshihiro Tatsumi · Sam Weber · Paul Sahre · Tony Millionaire · Nicholas Blechman · Jon Gray and many more.

It’s time for a round up of new record sleeves that have caught our eye of late. First up is the rather tasty Limited Edition Box Set (shown above) of Brian Eno’s forthcoming album, his first release on Warp Records: Small Craft On A Milk Sea – a musical collaboration with Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams…

Inside the slipcase there are three 12″ gatefold packages (above) with imagery adorning both front and back…

Open all the full colour, casebound (like a hardback book) 12″ gatefold packs to find that one houses two CDs – one of the album, the other has four additional tracks. The second gatefold package contains the album pressed on two 180g vinyl discs. The third pack contains a 12″ square litho print on 352gsm Mohawk Superfine stock, wrapped carefully in protective tissue…

There also exists a slightly different version of this package – the Collectors’ Edition Box Set – which is essentially the same as above but the slip case features a real copper plate etched with the title and edition number, embedded in the spine of the case.

The other notable difference is that the print contained within the package isn’t the litho print that’s included in the other box set – but instead is a screenprint signed and numbered by Eno himself. The 250 prints are printed on 305 x 305mm 330gsm Somerset Radiant White papre at K2 Screen studio in London.

The work is a print application of the generative art that Brian has been developing throughout his career. Each print in the edition is created from an individual arrangement and combination of screenprinted layers. The images, alignment and colours were changed systematically through the printing process to ensure each print is completely unique. Warp records and Eno have kindly sent us scans of some of the editions to show how they vary:

Design & art direction: Nick Robertson
Printed & bound in England by Something Else
Packaging photography: Full Stop
Screenprint photography: Nick Turner
Studio photography: Tim Eves

Our man at Warp just told us, somewhat disappointingly, that the screenprint-containing Collectors’ package has just sold out on pre-orders. Boo. The other box set is still available (at the time of writing) as is the chance to buy the album in an 8-panel digipack. Of course it is also available as a high quality download. The album is due for release on November 15 here in the UK – more details at warp.net

I spotted this delightful 10″ record sleeve whilst perusing the delights of Concrete Hermit‘s recently opened central London store in Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street. I had to buy it. The white vinyl disc with illustrated labels (see below) helped make the decision…

I recognised the artwork as being by Stevie Gee, who I’d only recently discovered because he’s done some rather tasty Risograph prints through Landfill Editions (which is the subject of a brand new CRTV film). The record is the first release from East London-based record label Big Dirty Engine, set up and run by Nick Jaguar, owner of Shoreditch bar-cum-gallery Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes. Yes, the very same Nick Jaguar who performs on this record.

The label’s website announces that it is “a boutique record label specialising in ballsy lo-fi music. Pairing musicians with artists to produce limited edition vinyl releases.”

The record is limited to just 250 numbered copies, although there are 1000 cassettes of the single out now too featuring Ride On lettered by illustrator Jiro Bevis. There are different colour versions – here’s one of the 500 red versions:

For more info about the release (and to listen to it), visit nickjaguar.bandcamp.com

This is an oil painting by London-based painter John Stark who was commissioned by band Crystal Fighters to create artwork for their recently released album, Star Of Love (finished album artwork shown below).

Not being sure as to how many oil-on-wood-panel images there are gracing album covers these days, I thought I’d ask artist Stark about the commission:

CR:How did you end up creating the album cover for Crystal Fighters – do you know the band?

JS: No, I didn’t know them before, the album artwork came about through a fortuitous alignment of random meetings, surprising coincidences and drunken conversations via several degrees of separation.

CR: Have you been commissioned to create album / music sleeve artwork before? If yes – who for and when?

JS: Its not usually my bag, but this was something that interested me due to the nature of our similar interests. I have done an album cover before for the group Commix’s Call To Mind – but that was an image that already existed rather than commissioned.

CR: Tell us about the artwork – how did you collaborate with the band / an art director (both?) on this. Oh yes, also tell us about the typography – that was done by another creative? Did you get to discuss that too?

JS: There was lots of discussion and exchanging of ideas with Crystal Fighters – and presenting of mood boards was useful. It became clear very soon on that we there was a cross over of similar interests so they trusted me to come up with something after they had outlined what they where after. I was particularly interested in the Basque origins of their music and the folklore that accompanied that.

I also wanted to make it look like an album cover rather than another one of my paintings, which was a a welcome challenge and a chance to step outside my normal practice. So the result, I think, is a surprising image that would not exist without the collaboration of ideas and input from the band but it still maintains the foreboding gothic overtones and technique of my other paintings. The typography was done by someone else but I think it really compliments the artwork and they have done a great job.

CR: You work in oil paint – how long does a commission like this take – and what size is the piece “in real life” as opposed to on a 12″ record sleeve or a
CD booklet?

JS: It really depends, sometimes they can come together really quickly if all goes well, but sometimes there are problems and it can take months to realise how to finish a painting, its similar to solving puzzles. This piece was undertaken in about six weeks and is slightly larger than 12″, which is the usual scale i work on and am comfortable with.

For more info on Stark’s work, visit johnstarkgallery.co.uk

Turns out that the beautiful printed ‘inner sleeve’ packaging of the Test Pressing EP by Flowers and Sea Creatures is really hard to photograph and showcase at just 569 pixels wide. So you’ll have to take my word for it that this is really nice.

The design, by I Want, features a black on white rectangular check pattern, through which intricate and ancient looking illustrations of fish (sea creatures!) can be seen on one side. Flip it over and the illustration on this side is of a bunch of roses (flowers). Note the central vinyl labels are treated in a suitably test pressing kind of way. All very literal, but very nicely done. Label: Buzzin’ Fly. Listen to the EP here.

This isn’t an old battered map, but the cover of Oxford-based band The Winchell Riots’ debut EP, pressed on 10″ vinyl in an edition of 300 (there is also an edition of 300 CDs too). The artwork is a collaboration between the band and designer Rian Hughes.

Band member Phil McMinn told us about the design: “Based on an old map of Milton in Scotland, where my parents grew up, Rian has customised the details within the map to include lyrics from the songs. A lot of the lyrics on the EP deal with space travel, oceans and the idea of history, and Rian accordingly designed the package to look like a lost library artefact, sticker sealed, barcoded and number-stamped.”

Here is a detail from the cover and a shot of the back cover:

For more info on The Winchell Riots, visit thewinchellriots.co.uk.

And finally, this is the cover for Tokyo duo COS/MES‘ album entitled, Gozmez Land *Chaosexotica, due out on November 8 on label ESP Intstitute. Artwork by Mario Hugo.

Here’s a little sampler of the music from the release accompanied by what can only be described as chameleon-tastic film clips: