Still Not There Yet

One day in a meeting at The Purple Gates, Tony said ‘I’ve had a great remix done from Are we There Yet, maybe we should do a whole album of remixes’. A few weeks later, I was briefed on ‘Are We There Yet: The Med School Scans’.

Tony’s idea for the artwork was Soviet X-ray bootlegs, but this wasn’t something we could produce with any kind of authenticity, even on a small scale, without looking like just another X-ray record cover.

Instead I came up with an idea for coloured vinyl with a purpose (rather than coloured vinyl for novelty), and made a cover design that you have to scan with the record to be able to read.

The whole project looked great once printed – fluorescent Pantones worked perfectly with the colour-blocking idea and look super-tasty in person!

Where We Going?

swi-tl

The other big album project I’ve been working on lately is London Elektricity’s ‘Are We There Yet?’. Tony already had the image he wanted for his album cover from a photo shoot while touring in Japan, but he wanted to go all-out for the special edition of the album, and it was left to me to figure out how.

art-its

Because of the album’s travel-related title, we agreed to do a series of twelve postcards (one for each track on the LP) and a fold-out map too. First I was given a list of track titles, then I got to listen to the album not long after. Tony’s music always sounds like a slightly-retro adventure to me, and I know he’s really into science fiction, so I decided to treat each track as an intergalactic destination, and made each postcard to be a 1960s-inspired travel poster.

five

Once I finished all the postcards I turned my attention to the fold-out map. I couldn’t really make a conventional map as the elements from the postcards transcended planets, oceans and objects, so I came up with this abstract illustration for the job.

mapp

The style of this work is a little bit outside of my usual repertoire, but I’m really pleased with how everything turned out! The map artwork is included in all formats, but to get the postcards, you had to get one of the super-limited box sets.

tdp

Three Little Websites

Hospital realised that WordPress isn’t the be-all and end-all of creating functional websites, which was great news for me as hacking up themes take a surprisingly long time! Instead, I’ve been getting to be a little more freeform with the websites I’ve been creating for them lately, resulting in these three little websites:

NuTone.org

The idea for this site was borne out of a conversation with Matt Riley, the man in charge of web promo at Hospital. He suggested that as our tracks end up on YouTube anyway and we had such a striking cover photo, that we could make the page a big version of the album cover made up of YouTube videos.

Continue reading “Three Little Websites”

Tony Colman Waffle Machine

colbo

I had forgotten about this until this morning, when I woke up and found an email from Tony telling me it was alive- the first loosely-Trickartt-related iPhone application!

Hospital have been wanting an iPhone application for a long time- it got to the point where Tony was trying to convince me to make an app myself (I wish I could, but I am still wrestling with PHP as it is). He was trying to tell me to remake the Grooverider Soundboard then cut them in on the profits (I think he’s been reading too many App Store gravy train reports), so I suggested as a joke that we should make a Tony Colman soundboard from his podcast.

(Un?)fortunately, after a day or two, he decided he liked the idea- so that much he enlisted Phil of Code Army to make it happen. Riley went through the archive and got some clips together, then I did some graphics for the interface, which Phil then tied together and (I assume) sent into the black hole of iPhone app submission. And here it is!

colmin2

It’s pretty simple, and pretty crass, but Phil was kind enough to put my name in the credit on the app store (pictured above) without me even asking, which was nice of him! So there we are. I am now in iPhone Territory!

 
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