Wish You Were Here (outer and inner sleeve, 1975) by Pink Floyd. Whenever people ask questions about your work at some point the subject of influences always turns up. Influences for me are usually few, they’re those things which skew your perception to such a degree—or which enlarge the range of possibilities—that they make you [...]
A Chinese postage stamp celebrating the Year of the Snake. • Cyclopean is a collaboration from Burnt Friedman, Jono Podmore and Can founding members Jaki Liebezeit, and Irmin Schmidt. The Quietus has a preview of all the tracks from their forthcoming EP. Great stuff. • Ten Things You (Possibly) Don’t Know About Kraftwerk. Related: a [...]
The Hand of Fate, Life magazine, October, 1912. Artist unknown. • In Search of Barney Bubbles: the great graphic designer is profiled on BBC Radio 4, Monday, 2nd January. And speaking of album cover designers, Cool Hunting talked to Storm Thorgerson about his work. • FACT mix 310 is a hugely eclectic two-parter from Moon [...]
Star City by Tomislav Ceranic. • Noted in the blogosphere this week: A Journey Round My Skull underwent a transmutation into 50 Watts; a blog devoted to artist, designer & illustrator Jessie M King; “The arts and musicks of the supranatural” at Secret Lexicon; From the Farm, Railroads, Sewing Machines & Beyond, lengthy reminiscences from [...]
Masters of Terror, Vol 1, Corgi Books, 1977. No illustrator credited. It was all happening this week so there’s a lot to get through. Are you ready? Deep breath… For ye Hogge doth be of ye outer Monstrous Ones, nor shall any human come nigh him nor continue meddling when ye hear his voice, for [...]
The Expansion of the First Great Ornamental Age: 3 Distances (2009) by Seher Shah. • Great Female Artists? Think Karachi. “One reason for the unusually high ratio of female artists in Pakistan has to do with the fact that the art industry has not traditionally been viewed as a lucrative business by men, says South [...]
The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue. • Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à [...]
Sleeve for I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass (1978), a 7″ single by Nick Lowe. Design by Barney Bubbles. Continuing an occasional series. Designer Vic Fieger had a guest post at Reasons To Be Cheerful earlier this week examining Barney Bubbles’ use of the human face in his graphic designs. This is one side [...]
left: Maria (2010); right: Dawn (2010). British artist Jessica Harrison undermines the saccharine innocence of porcelain figurines in a manner which would no doubt appeal to a Surrealist and black humorist like Jan Svankmajer. As well as these recent pieces, her website features further contemporary takes on Surrealism including a number of pencil drawings, one [...]
Poster for Mademoiselle (1970) by Franciszek Starowieyski. Work has cranked into overdrive this week so posting will no doubt be minimal until some semblance of normality is restored. I can however mention two essential exhibitions which will be running through the forthcoming months. Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech [...]
Here at last is the book I spent a good part of last year designing. Into the Media Web is a huge volume as befits a huge talent, 720 pages of Michael Moorcock’s non-fiction spanning fifty years of his career from his days writing for sf and fantasy fanzines, through to journalism, reviews and articles [...]
Storm Thorgerson, he of the great design partnership Hipgnosis, has some of his album covers and other work in exhibition this month at the Idea Generation Gallery, London. The exhibition runs to May 2nd. This Sunday (April 11th) he’ll be signing copies of his books at the gallery from 2pm. Alongside some of the most [...]
Kieran at Sci-Fi-O-Rama was in touch recently asking me to contribute a paragraph about a favourite Roger Dean picture for this feature about the artist. The following splurge of polemic was the result, something I’d been intending on writing for a while. Since so many words would have overwhelmed the other contributions it’s being presented [...]
Two recent pieces of work which were being created at the same time so they share some similarity of style (and the same baroque flourish). Queer Noise is a music-related event taking place in Manchester (UK) next month. Music journalist Jon Savage will be leading the discussion and some may recognise the event title as [...]
Poster by Barney Bubbles for Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! (1980). Adelita, the publishers of Reasons To Be Cheerful: the life and work of Barney Bubbles, announced this week that Paul Gorman’s essential collection of BB graphics has been named Book of the Year in Mojo magazine: Reasons To Be Cheerful – the acclaimed study of [...]
top row: The Division Bell by Pink Floyd; A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay. bottom row: London Calling by The Clash; Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. The Royal Mail follows its series of British Design Classics postage stamps with a series dedicated to what they call “classic” album covers. The design classics [...]
Continuing an occasional series. A recent post at A Journey Round My Skull is a stylish series of Indian book jackets from 1964 to 1984. These impress partly for the way they rework western design approaches, and they consequently look very different from the florid visuals one might (lazily) expect of Indian cover design. Western [...]
Another authorless design: Vertigo #6360 616 (1973). Things we did (or didn’t) learn about album cover design this week. • The jury is still out as to whether Barney Bubbles designed the covers for the UK releases of Kraftwerk’s third and fourth albums, Ralf and Florian and Autobahn. BB experts Rebecca & Mike did clarify [...]
Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620. Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me [...]
I created a cover design recently for Jeff VanderMeer‘s new novel, Finch, and shortly after completing that Jeff asked if I could put together some cover ideas for his forthcoming writer’s guide, Booklife, which Tachyon will be publishing later this year. Jeff is known as a fantasy writer but this book was intended to have [...]
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