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A drawing by Lucille Clerc. • The usual imbalance of heat versus light this week but Kenan Malik and Teju Cole had some worthwhile things to say. Related: Atlantic illustrators respond to the events of Wednesday. And some history: covers of Charlie Hebdo‘s parent magazine, Hara-Kiri, whose legacy of bad taste and confrontation was overlooked […]

Pop music is one of the best forms of time travel when it summons a memory that returns you to a specific time and place. All I need to revisit the summers of 1981/82/83 is a blast from one of these albums, each a Martin Rushent production that benefited from his expertise with synth and […]

Or So It Seems (1983) by Duet Emmo. Design by The Brothers Quay. • “Make things, no rules, but be quick.” Bruce Gilbert, musician in (among others) Wire, Dome and Duet Emmo is interviewed. Related: Daniel Miller, Mute label boss and another member of Duet Emmo is interviewed (and provides a mix) at The Quietus. […]

Years before Brokeback Mountain, and a few years before The Place of Dead Roads, another pair of gay cowboys were causing a stir on a T-shirt in the SEX boutique, London, a shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in the mid-1970s. Paul Gorman’s latest piece of pop archaeology examines the history and possible […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Million Volt Light & Sound Rave (1967). More psychedelia as Paul Gorman at The Look alerts me to an exhibition of work by Pop artist Dudley Edwards running this month at 3345 Parr St, Liverpool. Edwards was a part of the Binder, Edwards & Vaughan design collective in the 1960s, renowned for their light […]

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 […]

The HAL Project. January flew by in a blizzard of work so posting here tended to rely more on pictures than words. As usual the things I’ve been designing will be unveiled when they’re closer to being published or released but for now here’s some new or not-so-new items worthy of note. • The HAL […]

Some work news. I finished this CD design last year but, as is often the case with these things, it’s taken a while to make its way into the world. This was the final piece of the Mindscape of Alan Moore project and it’s probably the last thing I’ll do which makes use of the […]

In which Christmas arrives two weeks early… It was nearly two years ago that I wrote “We’re overdue a decent book-length examination of his work and his influence” at the end of the epic Barney Bubbles post. Today I finally got to sit down with a copy of Paul Gorman’s wonderful monograph about the man […]

Or why Barney Bubbles rules… The Rumour were a Seventies band I never had any interest in, being part of the Stiff Records’ pub rock axis along with Nick Lowe and others; not weird or noisy enough for petulant moi. This is a shame since the Barney Bubbles design for their albums shows him at […]

For those who’ve been eagerly awaiting Paul Gorman’s Barney Bubbles monograph, here’s the latest. Readers in the UK may also like to know there’s a feature about the book in the current issue of The Word. By coincidence, if you turn the page in the magazine there’s another feature about the Rob Gretton book I […]

Four Hawkwind badges and a Nik Turner badge based on designs by Barney Bubbles. From the Coulthart archives. Readers who’ve been waiting for Reasons To Be Cheerful, Paul Gorman‘s landmark study of the life and work of artist and designer Barney Bubbles, may like to know that Paul was in touch today with the suggestion […]

This delightful piece of Art Nouveau-inflected grooviness is one of the new T-shirts designed by Nigel Waymouth for The Look via Topman. Waymouth, as some readers here may know, was part of Hapshash & the Coloured Coat in the late Sixties, London’s leading group of psychedelic poster artists. In addition to design, Waymouth and Sheila […]

My long and rambling post about the work of Barney Bubbles in January 2007 generated a considerable flurry of renewed interest in the great designer and ended by saying “We’re overdue a decent book-length examination of his work and his influence.” Just over a year later, here we are…. Paul Gorman was one of the […]