09 January 2009
With accessibility of inexpensive/digital recording equipment and home (or even laptop) studios, the rise of iTunes and the fall of major labels, indie bands have saturated the market in the past few years. I think, like in the design world, there are those bands who fight to keep atop the latest trend and may have a several thousand hits of their myspace page (or blog) for a few weeks, but die out quickly because they lack real substance. And then there are some real gems that cause me to praise the restructuring of the music business. Andrew Bird, for me, is one of those artists. He’s “Indie” in the sense that he’s on an indie label—Fat Possum—he records from a barn filled with egg-laying chickens in Illinois, and is generally difficult to classify into a specific genre, but I don’t think he’s the typical, trendy 2008–2009 indie group: there are no neon colors on his albums, few digital dance beats, and, although his jeans appear to be fairly fitted, I don’t know that I would go so far as to call them “skinny jeans.”
At any rate, he’s got an new album coming out in a couple weeks that NPR is previewing right now that is really, really good. I listened to it about three straight times yesterday and know that I’ve barely scratched the surface. Andrew Bird is a true musician and a gifted song-writer. He may not always be on top of my play list, but for the past 3 years or so—starting with a album redesign I did in school—he has been constantly in my play list.
Here’s a shot of the album cover (and inside flap):
This was for a letterpress class and I had a lot of fun doing it. I played a lot with heavy collage (obviously), altered appropriation, and various kinds of half-tone patterns. It may be a little intense and unfocused, but there’s still some things I quite like about it. Everything in the design does have specific relavance to the lyrics of the album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, and I feel the general tone and method of design and production fits the album—which, by the way, I listened to multiple times a day during the whole course of the project and never grew tired of… great album.
top photo by Cameron Wittig.
09 December 2008
This past summer, my friend Dane Hansen surprised us all and got married. And he did it in typical Dane Hansen fashion: He got Bryan Nivens to take and stylize the photo; he gave me free reign to design the announcement—which was then letterpressed by Rob at Tryst Press; Leo Patrone shot the wedding and the reception; Micah Anderson (along with our myself, Bret Meisenback, and Cedric Anderson) played the wedding march, al a Queen/Flash Gordon; and, finally, the Gatsbys—Micah, Cedric, and Grant Olsen—provided the music at the reception.
Dane, by the way, is an extremely talented designer and flash programmer. He works for Axis 41 in Salt Lake City and helps me out on a bunch of freelance work—including the Film is Not Dead Workshop site, which I just posted on my site, today.
These people—with the exception of Bryan, whom I’ve yet to meet—are the people I generally tackle projects with. Check out their work. It’s great.
Below is a close up of the announcement. It was really fun, challenging, and time consuming to create. Each letter is “hand cut and placed” into the design, using old Type Specimen books that I scanned at ridiculously high resolutions. Some of the lettering was even created for this piece due to missing letters in the samples…
The above photo was snatched from Black Eiffel, but unfortunately the photo isn’t as great as some of the work that’s up now.
05 December 2008
This morning, Mark Weinberg was nice enough to bring me into the studio and take some shots (or lots and lots, rather) of the work we completed for him this summer. I haven’t had time to go through the files, select, and edit the images to upload on my site, but that will follow shortly next week. In the meantime, please check out some of his work and vote for an entry of his in the PDN Student Photo Contest.
PS: if you’re reading this in Google Reader or something, take a second and link to the real page. Cody Buell—another great local photographer, as well as a talented programmer—built me a shiny, new blog. Older posts can be found here, if for some reason you need to track something down—like samples of good korean graphic design or the beautiful French type specimens that were stolen from my studio a few months back.
26 November 2008
In spite of not publishing anything in a while, I’ve been relatively busy here at SquatterStudios. All my summer projects have wrapped up and I should have photos to post in the coming days/weeks.
Also, my website is up. It’s been up for quite a while (you may have noticed) but with no content. I’m actually working on changing that right now—as opposed to saying I’m doing it online, but really not even thinking about it. Currently, I have a good portion of three different projects up there. It may not be hot-off-the-press new work, but at least something is there.
And, last—for today—Jonathan Canlas has finally launched his updated site, wrapping up a summer-plus of grueling work for him, which we’re both very excited about. I hope to have some pictures of the books I designed for him by late next week. As for today, though, Just the website. Take a gander. Dane Hansen—as always—did the masterful flash work.
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