“This black flag with the Shahada in white on it is the RAYAH, the flag of the Jihad in Islam. Not the banner of single group claiming for Jihad but the banner of the Jihad. The flag is Black and the Shahada always remains in white. Every Muslim fighting in Jihad will hold this flag. You can find the Rayah over the shoulders of Muslim fighters in Chechnya, sometimes in the street of Palestine, in Bosnia was very used by the “Black Swans” group of the Muslim Bosnian Army.” (Editor’s note: The flag of the Emirate of Afghanistan from 1880-1901 was just a solid black flag. Holy shit.)
Peter Saville on his album cover artwork →
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division (Factory, 1979)
This was the first and only time that the band gave me something that they’d like for a cover. I went to see Rob Gretton, who managed them, and he gave me a folder of material, which contained the wave image from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. They gave me the title too but I didn’t hear the album. The wave pattern was so appropriate. It was from CP 1919, the first pulsar, so it’s likely that the graph emanated from Jodrell Bank, which is local to Manchester and Joy Division. And it’s both technical and sensual. It’s tight, like Stephen Morris’ drumming, but it’s also fluid: lots of people think it’s a heart beat. Having the title on the front just didn’t seem necessary. I asked Rob about it and, between us, we felt it wasn’t a cool thing to do. It was the post-punk moment and we were against overblown stardom. The band didn’t want to be pop stars
Closer
Joy Division (Factory, 1980)
Peter Saville: “This cover for the band’s second album was like a work of antiquity, but inside is a vinyl album, so it’s a postmodern juxtaposition of a contemporary work housed in the antique. At first, I didn’t believe the photo was an actual tomb but it’s really in a cemetery in Genoa. When Tony Wilson (Factory co-founder) told me Ian Curtis had died I said, ‘Tony, we have a tomb on the cover.’ There was great deliberation as to whether to continue with it. But the band, Ian included, had chosen the photograph. We did it in good faith and not in any post-tragedy way”
Blue Monday
New Order (Factory, 1983)
“I’d been to see the band in the studio and Stephen gave me a floppy disk to take home. I thought it was a beautiful object. At the time, computers were in offices, not art studios. The floppy disc informs the design and the colour coding was from my interest in aesthetics determined by machines. It reflected the hieroglyphic visual language of the machine world. For example, the numbers in your cheque book aren’t really for you, they’re for a machine to read. I don’t know if the story about the label losing money on the cost of the sleeve is true. I sent the cover straight to the printers because everyone was in a hurry. I doubt the printers even gave a quote for Factory to respond to. The band had handicapped themselves as no one was likely to play it on the radio because it was seven minutes long. Ironically it sold a lot, and with an expensive sleeve”
Power, Corruption & Lies
New Order (Factory, 1983)
“The title seemed Machiavellian. So I went to the National Gallery looking for a Renaissance portrait of a dark prince. In the end, it was too obvious and I gave up for the day and bought some postcards from the shop. I was with my girlfriend at the time, who saw me holding a postcard of the Fantin-Latour painting of flowers and said, ‘You are not thinking of that for the cover?’ It was a wonderful idea. Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives. They’re seductive. Tony Wilson had to phone the gallery director for permission to use the image. In the course of the conversation, he said, ‘Sir, whose painting is it?’ To which the answer was, ‘It belongs to the people of Britain.’ Tony’s response was, ‘I believe the people want it.’ And the director said, ‘If you put it like that, Mr Wilson, I’m sure we can make an exception in this case’”
Finally getting around to making a handy one-page brand guidelines sheet so I don’t have to explain everything each time.
The cover art was conceived by Weymouth and Frantz with the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Walter Bender and his MIT Media Lab team. Using Melody Attack as inspiration, the couple created a collage of red warplanes flying in formation over the Himalayas. The planes are an artistic depiction of Grumman Avenger planes in honour of Weymouth’s father who was a US Navy Admiral. The idea for the back cover included simple portraits of the band members. Weymouth attended MIT regularly during the summer of 1980 and worked with Bender’s colleague, Scott Fisher, on the computer renditions of the ideas. The process was tortuous because computer power was limited in the early 1980s and the mainframe alone took up several rooms. Weymouth and Fisher shared a passion for masks and used the concept to experiment with the portraits. The faces were blotted out with blocks of red colour. Weymouth considered superimposing Eno’s face on top of all four portraits to insinuate his egotism—the producer wanted to be on the cover art together with Talking Heads—but decided against it in the end.
The rest of the artwork and the liner notes were crafted by the graphic designer Tibor Kalman and his company M&Co. Kalman was a fervent critic of formalism and professional design in art and advertisements. He offered his services for free to create publicity, and discussed using unconventional materials such as sandpaper and velour for the LP sleeve. Weymouth, who was sceptical of hiring a designing firm, vetoed Kalman’s ideas and held firm on the MIT computerised images. The designing process made the band members realise that the title Melody Attack was “too flippant” for the music recorded, and they adopted Remain in Light instead. Byrne has noted, “Besides not being all that melodic, the music had something to say that at the time seemed new, transcendent, and maybe even revolutionary, at least for funk rock songs.” The image of the warplanes was relegated to the back of the sleeve and the doctored portraits became the front cover. Kalman later suggested that the planes were not removed altogether because they seemed appropriate during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–1981.
Weymouth advised Kalman that she wanted simple typography in a bold sans serif font. M&Co. followed the instructions and came up with the idea of inverting the “A”s in “TALKING HEADS”. Weymouth and Frantz decided to use the joint credit acronym C/T for the artwork, while Bender and Fisher used initials and code names because the project was not an official MIT venture. The design credits read “HCL, JPT, DDD, WALTER GP, PAUL, C/T”. The final mass-produced version of Remain in Light boasted one of the first computer-designed record jackets in the history of music. Psychoanalyst Michael A. Brog has called its front cover a “disarming image, which suggests both splitting and obliteration of identity” and which introduces the listener to the album’s recurring theme of “identity disturbance”; he states, “The image is in bleak contrast to the title with the obscured images of the band members unable to ‘remain in light’.” (via Wikipedia)
Rare art books squad (Taken with instagram)
Graphic Design in Boystown U.K. →
When did the UK graphic design scene become so gender biased? Was it a gradual thing? How did we miss this? Which leads onto my next question… Why are male graphic designers so damn competitive about every little thing? Where are the designers that value harmony, balance and level-headedness. The ones that don’t need to be constantly self promoting because they don’t shout about everything they do, they just do it… and it works. I’m guessing they’re still around. They’re just being shouted down by the current‘boyworld’ of obnoxious geek designers, happier running work down than celebrating anything of any real significance.
I’ve started off a bit ranty here I know but seriously, how is this current rash of brash, negative, ‘boy racer’ types helping an industry that, you have to admit, needs all the help it can get at the moment, as it makes the traditional from relying on mostly print based work to tackling all manner of new, mostly digital, media.
Over the past 12 months we’ve seen more ‘networks’ of designers and developers forming. As well as a renewed clamour to dissect and crit the business of graphic design slowly growing in volume. Is it just that were been constantly told there are less jobs out there so, boys being the way they are, have grouped together, at the same time switching to competitive mode, in an attempt to starve off whatever circumstance lies ahead? Or is this a sign of the rise of the designer developer, coming from an industry that was moulded, it’s fair to say, mostly by men, who are now finding a new voice in the elder industry of graphic design that they haven’t expected to have before.
Whatever the reason, the need for fellow designers to squabble and generate negative comments, tweets or whatever on the subject of graphic design does the industry, and all those that reside in it, a dis-service. Our industry, like most other modern, media-based industries, is shrinking. It has happened to publishing, to music, to cinema and it’s now happening to graphic design. To stem the tide of clients turning away from using traditional graphic designers, to welcoming the idea of being ‘undesigned’, we need to provide a united front. We need to support creative endeavours of merit, not just the ones that a handful of our mates happen to have come up with in their ‘spare time’.
There is a danger that designers will only end up discussing design with other designers. That graphic design will become a niche thing for wannabe artisans. We are already loosing our relevance, and therefore influence, in the eyes of many potential clients so how about we all start pulling our heads out of our arses and celebrating the fact that we are all fortunate enough to work in one of the most amazing industries around. An industry that, when successful, touches the lives of everyone, not just other designers, and stop the ugly bickering, one-ups-man-ship and infighting.
Graphic design deserves better than that and you know it.
