Oh yeah, I design record covers

I realised recently that a lot of my favourite record covers from the past couple of years (since I last put anything on my blog here at least!) have all been very typographic. And very jumbled in their own ways too.

Four record covers for Anaïs featuring hand-drawn lettering and bright colours in unconventional layouts

I’ve had a lot of fun doing these singles for Anaïs over the past few months. It’s good to break the rules sometimes and I think I’ve broken all of the ones I hold dear with these – nothing lines up, the cases are all mixed, the colours all clash, and the letterforms are all wildly inconsistent. But it does it for me!

Record cover for the reissue of 'Beautiful Lies' by B-Complex, featuring hand-painted and hand-cut collaged typography

One of Hospital’s landmark tracks, B-Complex’s Beautiful Lies, got the re-release and remix treatment. We all really liked the artwork I made for 2010’s VIP remix, but the label thought it would be nice to do this artwork in the colours of the trans pride flag for Matia on this more modern reissue. I loved the brief, but was quickly reminded how weird the letterforms of the title all fitted together in a square. Once again, my text got all wobbly and I ended up making it work with this unconventional arrangement.

Two record covers for Degs featuring typograhy in the font Futura Bold, where the letters have been unconventionally condensed

This pair of covers were kind of the logical conclusion of the artwork I have been making for Degs since his debut release in 2018. I love me some Futura Bold at the best of times, and with these covers I was trying to condense the letters into as tight an arrangement as possible in the square shape of a record cover, without them completely losing legibility.

Record cover for 'bailejungle' by Urbandawn, featuring a collage of different typefaces and styles

A slightly more conventional typographic collage is this single for Urbandawn. I was instructed that the title had to specifically be all lower-case, which made the collage a bit more challenging, but I like how it turned out!

Record cover for a single by four artists - Doktor, P Money, D Double E, and Diagnostix, featuring different typefaces and a colour palette taken from Doktor's previous singles

This cover was a difficult one to make work – I had a lot of names that were collaborating on this release, somehow managed to lock this up into a tight square, and even got a few typograhic easter eggs in there too.

Puppies: Better than social media

A graph showing the change in my attention from social media to my dog over the course of time

Two things have happened in my life over the past eighteen months-or-so that I didn’t think were related, but I think have proven to be. The first is that I got a dog, and the second is that I have dramatically reduced my use of social media. And I think the net benefit is that I’ve been happier for it.

I was never particularly big on social media, and my drivers for leaving it behind were I think more down to decisions being made by the platforms themselves. Nobody needs another blog post nobody will read about the downfall of Twitter or how much Meta absuses Instagram notifications, but what I will say is that one of my favourite technological discoveries of the past year is that you can post to Instagram straight from the iPhone’s Photos app, without ever having to open the Instagram app itself. It’s been a joy – I’m still showing the world that wants to see that I’m still thinking creatively every single day, but I don’t have to get sucked in to whatever its algorithm wants to show me when I post my daily drawings.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided that having a puppy is a bit like a victorian TV set. It has been surprisingly hard work training a puppy, but boy is it entertaining. Our border terrier is a very funny dog and she provides so much amusement it’s become clear to me that dogs were probably a very good way of keeping people amused in an era before mass media. And boy does she get fed up with me when I pick up my phone!

This is all a very long-winded way of saying that I would recommend a puppy as a good distraction for breaking the social media habit.

Two Achievements for Twenty-twenty-two

It’s funny how sometimes doing stuff means you don’t end up doing stuff… like updating this weblog. A year has already passed since my last entry, but that’s because I’ve been doing other stuff. I have two achievements from 2022 that I am quite proud of though, and are definitely worth not disappearing into the sands of time:

I didn’t (but I came close to) win the Klaus Flugge Prize

It’s really been one of the greatest achievements of my career as a graphic artist to have been shortlisted for the 2022 Klaus Flugge Prize – an award for newcomers to children’s illustration – for Alley Cat Rally.

To have been considered one of the six best of the year was just amazing – I’m really not used to having such recognition for the stuff I make. To have had the book published in the first place was amazing (and frankly still kind of hard to believe happened!), and to have seen parents and kids enjoy the book has been just as difficult to imagine, but to have people who clearly know kids’ books and illustration pick mine out from a huge pool means surprisingly a lot to me.

I made a little video about being shortlisted for the prize this summer. I’m not too disappointed that I didn’t win the whole prize in the end – having a certificate to put on my office wall means a surprising amount to a precious artistic ego.

My certificate for being shortlisted for the Klaus Flugge Prize 2022

I bought a house

Speaking of my office wall, the other massive thing that happened in my world this year is that Lilly and I bought a house! It’s a hundred-year-old house in the woods with a garden and a surprisingly generous workshop, and we love it.

As anyone privileged enough to have gone through the process of buying a home will likely tell you, the process was painful, and ours especially so, but it did eventually happen, and we are glad it’s over.

It has been an endless source of projects since we got the house, and in 2022 I managed to make videos about a couple of the many projects I’ve already undertaken. As I’ve probably mentioned if you’ve read my past postings here, I’ve been making videos mostly to try and improve my storytelling and to be less afraid of my own voice, and secondarily because it’s quite nice for me to have a record of what I’ve been up to – something I can look back on and remind myself I did actually do. Chasing views and trying to go big on YouTube definitely hasn’t been my priority, so it was a massive surprise when one of my videos this year did – somehow – go big.

The video that found a surprise audience on YouTube was one about me getting a used Henry Hoover vacuum cleaner and repainting it. I’m usually pretty chuffed if my video view counts get into three figures, so seeing this one ramp up to what is now 160,000 views was just bizarre. It’s a pity that I haven’t earned anything for the entertainment I appear to have provided (especially considering YouTube has been running ads against it, whether I want them to or not), but I’m glad it has provided intrigue.

As far as I can tell, there’s a surprising vacuum-cleaner-fancying subculture on YouTube that picked up on the video. I had no idea why it was this video when it happened though, so it made uploading the next video all the more intimidating. I eventually followed it up with a nice tour of my last Post-it book, which didn’t get the traction at all, and has an otherwise better-than-usual 150 views at time of writing. Hey ho.

Having the house is good fun though. Although I didn’t try and document it in video, I am just a couple of skirting boards and paint touch-ups short of having finished redecorating our new living room now, which is exciting. Maybe some of 2023’s projects will warrant more videos though.

So with those two things alone considered, 2022 was a pretty good year, not to mention a couple of record cover designs I thought were particularly successful last year also. I hope that the highlights continue to outweigh the lows for all people on this planet and others!

Christmas Chat-up

Hand-letterpressed Christmas card featuring Asta the cat driving a motorised Yule Log

As is our little household tradition, we print up our own Christmas cards every year on a tiny, hand-operated letterpress. We usually try and let our experiences of the past year direct what the design is, and after the second year of pandemic-life, we almost didn’t get our cards made in time for the season, because we couldn’t think of anything exciting that happened in our house in 2021.

Then we spotted the elephant (or should it be cat?) in the room: Of course something totally awesome happened this year – I had my first children’s picture book published! So we went pretty simple with the design, and I drew up Asta driving another absurd vehicle, but in a Christmas stylee. It’s one of my favourite seasonal accoutrements, the yule log!

If you haven’t checked it out already, have a look at Alley Cat Rally – perhaps someone small might enjoy finding it under their tree!

Toothpaste and Garage Doors

I continue to find documenting some of my projects by way of video an interesting challenge. I’ve averaged one video a month in 2021, which is a pretty good pace, and think I’ve been getting better at making them, though I’ve no idea how I could get anyone to actually watch them. Here are a few of my more recent short videos I haven’t mentioned on my website until now:

Improving my Game Boy Advance

My little old Game Boy Advance got the consumer-tech-equivalent of sunburn this year, so I set about making it look less putrid, then got carried away making technological improvements to it while I was at it too.

Painting a Portrait of My Dog

I set about painting a portrait of my dog, and timelapsed the process of painting it. I thought it was a really terrible portrait when I was done but not a bad video – and now I think the portrait is OK. I still don’t know if I’m going to put it up on a wall somewhere though.

Toothpaste

This video wasn’t very favoured by the YouTube algorithm, if the fact that nobody has watched it is anything to go by. Or maybe it’s just too random – my better half certainly thought so. Just a little video about finding inspiration somewhere strange and making something from it!

Hospital Top 5

I had posted about the Hospital record cover exhibition in a more timely fashion here already, but over the course of the past couple of months I put together a video about my five favourite covers from the exhibition, and some of the design thinking behind them too. I think it turned out pretty good!

Papa’s Garage Door

My grandpa, who helped me on so many of my random endeavours over time, passed away in 2020. The pandemic dragged the process out, but his passing means that we have been clearing my grandparents’ house recently. So before the house leaves the family, I thought I would document one of my grandpa’s finest domestic engineering moments for historic value. I think an automatic garage door doesn’t seem very remarkable to anyone these days, but if you watch the video, you’ll see how brilliant his home-made one is!

Twentieth Century Maps

An illustration of a lost robot attempting to look at a paper map

My grandpa passed away last year, and though it wasn’t Covid-19 that got him, one of the nth-order-effects of the pandemic is that I’ve had loads of time to explore my grandparents’ legacy. They were fervent travellers, and I recently discovered a box of old tourist maps from some of the places they visited across their lives.

Tourist maps may not seem like such an interesting artefact today, but some of these were just plain lovely. Products of a pre-computer design era, and before they became cheaply-printed vehicles for advertising, they’re just nice to look at.

While I’m sure a 45-year-old map of bus routes in Rome isn’t going to have a functional purpose any more, they’re still such attractive images that I’ve decided to share them with the wider internet under a liberal usage license. I think some of these images have the potential to be used in artwork in interesting ways, which is part of the reason I’ve digitised them myself, in arbitrarily high resolution.

How high-res they are largely depends on how big the physical map was – for the bigger maps I photographed them in pieces, then did a quick stitching of them in my ancient version of Photoshop. Some of the seams aren’t perfect, but that’s not really why the images are there.

Two crops from some of the old maps I found

Surprisingly, this isn’t anywhere near all of the maps in the collection I found, but I just picked out the ones I thought were the prettiest. I particularly like one of the maps of Venice, a surprisingly-cheerful and hand-drawn map of Manhattan, and how much Washington DC looks like a Sim City map.

I hope whoever finds them makes something interesting with them – hopefully something better than opportunists selling overpriced prints of them on Etsy, because that would make me sad. Make something cool, internet!

Twentieth century maps in high resolution

25 Years of Hospital Art

I’ve never really thought of Hospital as the establishment, but having been a going concern for a quarter of a decade now, it suddenly seems pretty well-settled in the musical landscape. For one of the many facets of this anniversary, Hospital organised a virtual art exhibition with our old friends at Art Vinyl, makers of nifty ‘Play and Display’ record cover frames.

Animation of moving through the 25 Years of Hospital Art virtual exhibition

The virtual nature obviously makes it pandemic-friendly (I still haven’t got my second vaccine yet!), so after a couple of false starts and venue changes, Chris at Hospital and the Art Vinyl guys got set up in Defected Records’ basement event space.

Chris and I had to pick fifty covers, which seems like a lot, but was pretty difficult considering Hospital’s catalogue is closer to 450 now, and that doesn’t even include the not-quite-100 on Med School as well. We filtered it down to albums that came out on vinyl only, and began whittling down to our favourites from there.

There’s more than just the record covers in the exhibition though – there are a selection of some of the original pieces of art I made for the covers dotted around, as well as many other bonus features. And! Chris and I also wrote a little commentary about some of our particular favourites in the exhibition.

I’ve been designing covers for Hospital for about fifteen years now, and I’m not sure if I’m proud or terrified when looking at this exhibition!

On the subject of how I make record covers for Hospital…

I also recently revisited the footage of making a pair of EPs for Logistics, from just before the pandemic-era. I’ve edited them into a nice new ‘How did this happen?’ video, which talks through the inspiration, and how I made the artwork. Check it out below!

And check out the 25 Years of Hospital Art exhibition!

Empathy For The Grass

Timelapse of Wimbledon's Centre Court in 2021

I love watching Wimbledon – it’s full of so many weird traditions that make it pleasingly out-of-step with today’s capitalism-motivated world. There’s so much I don’t understand about it though – like why they play this competition on a surface that ends up completely wrecked by the end of the tournament, just in time for the most important matches.

I took a screenshot of the first serve of every set played on Centre Court this year, at least as best as I could manage, then used Photoshop to auto-align all the frames and export them as this gif. It’s funny to see what becomes of it each year, only to be regrown and re-manicured, ready to be wrecked again next year. Life is a funny thing!

The first and last points played on Wimbledon Centre Court in 2021

Asta Goes Intercontinental

Plush Asta from Alley Cat Rally holding Canadian and USA flags

Alley Cat Rally is now broadly available in all English-speaking territories in the WORLD! This Tuesday, 6th July, marked its publication in USA and Canada, and it was also published at some point in the past month in Australia and New Zealand too, so along with its April release here in the UK, that covers it all pretty well.

I’ve still got no idea how well it is doing, but I have been entered into what for me is a crazy new world, of the odd complement on social media. It’s been a few months of lovely surprises, videos from parent-friends, and generally nice people, which is incredibly gratifying.

I have made a couple more ACR-related videos in the past couple of months too.

Flying Eye managed to connect me with doing a window-painting job at a local bookshop to me, in Tring, which is just a little further out in the Chiltern Hills from where I live. I ended up doing it on a miserably rainy day, but with a bit of help, I put all the alley cats up in the window. It turned out pretty good!

I also made a video I titled ‘How did this happen?’, talking through the conception and making-of the book.

Here’s to people actually buying a thing I made, and to me dreaming up Asta and the alley cats’ next adventure!

Alley Cat Rally mini projects

The release of my book is creeping closer! It’s less than a month before Alley Cat Rally is published in the UK, and over the past few weeks I have been nervously trying to think of things I can do to promote the book myself.

I’ve started by making a mini-site that gives a good overview of the book, the characters, and the places you can preorder it, alongside some other fun graphics and odds-and-ends.

That’s table stakes though, so I’ve done a couple more interesting projects that I’ve also made videos about.

The first mini-project is the ballad of the little washer. I’ve had this on my shelves for years, but a desire to open it up and add some ballast to it became a mission to connect it to the internet, programming it so it will spin whenever anyone visits the short link I set up to preorder the book:

The second project is a bit less technical, but only slightly: I made a plush version of Asta, the star of the book. She wears a great pair of goggles in Alley Cat Rally, so I had to figure out how to make them, and ended up rigging up my own vacuum-forming setup, on a home kitchen scale:

I am pleased with both of these projects, and also with the videos themselves! I think I am slowly getting more natural at using my voice, which I’m hoping will come in handy as I try to join my publisher in promoting the book!

 
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