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32 hours on Photoshop later and I think I’ve done a good job. Although not technically illustration, these compostions of over 60 photos/scans/drawings constitute the artwork of an 8 page CD cover booklet for Death & a Cure’s latest album. It’s a bit of a sneak preview as the album isn’t out just yet, but it’s some of my most ambitious work in years and I can’t wait to get it out there.
Lucky to have worked on this fine project. Lead single from Perth based Death & a Cure, The Endless Escape, which I got to illustrate and design. There will be an album launch in Perth soon, followed by a multi-date tour of the US. Get all the pesky details and have a listen at his myspace.
If you want a free track, head on over to his facebook page.
One of the pains of my job is working with entire panels of people to create a logo. Every manager, assistant manager, sales assistant, sales manager and anyone else from the vice president to the cleaner gets a chance to offer their opinion on the concepts.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good idea to involve other people in the process. It’s can be easy to get stuck in box or slightly misinterpret the objective. But, the principle of too many cooks spoil the broth is true. Not only true, but too many cooks completely overblow the budget, confuse the direction and go in circles for weeks is also true. Although, not as easy to remember.
My advice to new designers is to learn the art of presenting. It’ll save you mindless hours of late night tweaks and you’ll want to hurl your expensive computer out the window much less. I might write more on this later, but for now remember a couple of things:
This has opened a can of beans on this topic, so I might return to it at a later date and offer more of my befuddled wisdom.
As for the logo’s above, these all actually come from pretty good clients. However, none of them will ever see the light of day as they are outcasts of the creative process. Except of course for this brief moment here, now on my blog. So please, enjoy them now before they have to return to the dark wastes of my backup hard-drive.
Sometimes things just don’t make it to the final stage of production, a little thing called client approval can and will get in the way. Here’s how I find it happens:
The scenario often starts with the client saying, “just do whatever.” If this happens, red lights should start flashing in your head. Really, they actually mean, “I know exactly what I want, but I won’t tell you until you’ve spent hours researching, designing, clipping, juggling, changing and stumbling your way through every possible scenario.”
What is cool? Whenever I work out what cool is, it moves. Like a bandana wearing leopard suddenly leaping away into the dark and morphing into cliché. It’s an endless chase. Is the word ‘cool’ cool? Probably not. Should I hang onto it until it becomes cool again? Again, probably not. Are blogs cool? Certainly not. Is fashion cool? Broadly speaking and by definition, yes.
So, are fashion blogs cool? It’s that grey area where cool could be hiding. Perhaps they now just cliché? Meaning they were once cool, but then got overcooled and are now uncool. Skulls for instance, was once an integral part of 2007/2008 fashion with the ability to turn an ordinary shirt into an amazing, friend-winning, door-opening wardrobe centre piece. But now every second shirt in supermarkets from here to south-east Asia has at least one slapped on the front.
Somewhere there must be some kind of board that tallies up what is cool and what isn’t. Some kind of stock exchange that gains and looses points as things get cool and uncool. Constantly changing and moving yet still keeping a definite record of exactly how cool something is. Today I would have watched in awe as Eminem stocks dropped and Sacha Baron Cohen’s drastically rose over last nights MTV Awards. But then again, knowing exactly what is cool probably means is not cool anymore.
