Classically beautiful and hauntingly melancholic, Jacaszek’s Glimmer exists in that thin space between orchestral and ambient. Replete with harpsichord and clarinet, the Eastern European sensibilities of the Baroque period twist around the sounds of bitcrushed digital noise to create a delicate tension that makes the record compelling and beautiful.

The sleeve reflects Jacaszek’s moody atmospherics perfectly. Executed by Michael Cina—founder of the design studio, Cina Associates—the cover features a broken, fragile gold leaf ellipse set against a dark background. Both earthy and sophisticated, the contrast matches the simple elegance of the music. Recently, Rock That Font caught up with Michael Cina to discuss the cover design, naive craftsmanship and the value of not knowing your limits.

You’re a bit of a renaissance man—you’re an artist, a designer and a typographer—how does that play out when you’re designing for an album cover, where do you start first: with the art or the typography?

Recently I have been thinking about this topic. I feel that design is an exploration of semiotics, the visual language of what all images say (typography included). That is my main guidepost for producing an album cover. I am trying to use album covers as a mode of communication.

A lot of times I start with visual ideas and more often than not, I leave type towards the later part of the process. I can do anywhere from 10 to 100 visual ideas, so by that time, the image becomes a little more elevated in its importance.

The typographic aspect of the project is usually me getting myself out of a corner that I put myself in by not thinking about more about the typographic aspect. I use type sparingly on a lot of covers, but I am always aware of what it is saying.

Recently I started on a cover using typography as the main element. After two hours of working on it I ended up doing a cover with no type on it at all!

So when you started working on the Jacaszek project, were you already thinking about the visual statement as a whole or were you just trying to pick up on some kind of visual imagery that would relate to his brand of postmodern orchestral music?

I am trying to hit a lot of different thoughts and ideas all at once and it is difficult to capture that. The music was finished and I got a copy that I had listened to a couple of times, shortly after that I got the brief on what Michal was thinking when he made the music. The album name was Glimmer and that was the main approach to follow. Four other guides to go by were “golden fabric, glimmering light on the golden surface, wind, and disappearing horizon.” He also wanted something flat with no dimension, he was very specific about this. Some of the descriptions negate themselves so I started thinking about what I would do for a week or so.

My original idea (shown on inner sleeves) was to take some earth and bind it to a canvas so it would have low contrast. I painted everything black and then bound gold leaf to it. The texture of the earth broke the delicate surface of the gold leaf. The final results were photographed over a period of time to get the different light of the day captured against the surface. In the end, I thought it was good, but something was missing. A month passed and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

One day I was working on some art and I painted black over two paintings that I had been working on, let them dry, then bound gold leaf to the surface. I never really thought about it before I started, it just felt like what I should do. The final results are what you see on the cover and labels. I think it fits his descriptions quite well accounting for all the considerations there are making an album cover.

I showed the ideas to some of my friends and a couple of responses were “looks like human skin” and “an Arvo Part record” and I thought that was the perfect cross section. When Michal saw these he was very happy with the results as well.

It definitely gives the viewer a perfect visual analogy for the music—beautifully fragile with darkness at the edges. I feel like the best album packaging design does that, it supports the content. I feel like even the typography kind of pushes the viewer toward the music—delicate and subtle. What led you to choosing the sans serif for the cover?

Yeah, the music is very ambitious and serious. I think delicate and subtle applies very well. I feel that is what makes good typography, it adds to what is being said through the design and text. I try not to “over design” or clutter the work with meaningless noise. If you are really saying something, you have to figure out how to say it. I prefer the straight-no-chaser route.

I used Founders Grotesque on this cover. It is a typeface that Sam Valenti and I chose at the beginning of 2011. We felt it was unique enough to embody what we were seeing for the year. What I like is that Founders has a real light weight and odd proportions. The uppercase C is a little too illegible for my tastes but besides that, I love it. It still captures a bit of that naive craftsmanship that I am lead to.

Founders fit perfect into the Jacaszek cover, probably my best use of it to date. I tried some different and bolder approaches but they didn’t really work out too well. I worked on around 50 other type layouts before coming to this. It really matches how I picture the music sounding.

You said that you’re lead to “naive craftmanship” in typography, which I think is great. You’re a serious typographer but you seem really serious about the art and the design too. Do you have one aspect of what you do that you’re more drawn to or do all three kind of support each other?

I think to make wonderful things, you have to be naive to a certain aspect. I think the reality of any project can be overwhelming at times. The dreamers, the people who don’t know their limits, are often the ones who succeed. To get into typography, there is a LARGE learning gap and it is like that with a lot of things.

In the end, all three support each other to me. I have modeled my career around this model, it is not for most people. To me, it is somewhat seamless at times and other times the furthest from that. Right now I am working on a rebrand for a cable company, a rebrand for a sports cable network, and some font work for a sports network. On the side I am doing a little painting, designing everything for a documentary (title through poster), three cd covers, flying to NYC to do a large painting, rebranding/website for a travel company, working on a couple of start ups, just handed off an article for Creative review, and finishing up a font. I also have a blog, thenewgraphic.com that I update pretty regularly. So yeah, it is a juggling act. Of course not all these things are at once but they are all active. I want more work right now too.

So what’s next for you? What dreams are on the distant horizon that you’re reaching for?

My main goal is to do bigger and better work, all around. Really push/stretch myself further in new ways. To do that I need some regular clients that want to do great work together. This would seem like an easy task, but it is not. A lot of designers go under the notion that if they had a client like Ghostly (or whomever) they could do great work, but that is not true. You can do great (or horrible) work for anyone. It just takes trust, faith (in both parties), and a drive to push beyond the mundane.

Both corporations and clients seem to be scared or they have a lack of trust of designers, but it is the companies that take that leap of faith are the ones that reap the rewards. Ghostly could want to do mindless and trendy covers but they invested in art and design. Older brands like Braun, Olivetti, Container Corporation, Geigy, etc took that leap of faith by trusting design to work for them and it did. You see this today with Apple, Nike, and a couple of others, but it is not quite the same.

I am trying to find someone to represent me and my work. That has been a big dream of mine. I would like to be admitted into the AGI. It would be great to speak at the college I dropped out of. I would like to have a solo show at a large gallery next year. My main goal is to get another larger client though. Any takers?

It’s rare these days that an album grips me so completely as Bon Iver’s recent eponymous release. It’s an album in that classical, 60′s-era sense — every song is necessary and complete. Songwriter Justin Vernon has created a unified work that both touches on and transcends folk, soul, rock and chamber music. Maybe it’s Vernon’s work with Kanye West, maybe it’s his preoccupation with Bruce Hornsby, but Bon Iver, Bon Iver aims for the grand statement and wins; all the while managing to maintain that intimate scale that Vernon created on his debut, For Emma.

Fittingly, the album art manages to be both epic and minimal. Featuring the art work of Gregory Euclide, the cover is devoid of any other extraneous information. Throughout the packaging, designer and art director of Dead Oceans / JagJaguwar / Secretly Canadian, Daniel Murphy, keeps the layout simple and unadorned, balancing the intricacy of the artwork with the simplicity of a solid, unbroken scarlet red. As for traditional fonts, there are none. Murphy uses his own hand-writing for the whole project, giving the packaging a warm, organic feel.

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Daniel about the album artwork. Daniel Murphy is a serious artist and a serious thinker and the interview quickly moved far beyond discussing fonts and layouts straight into the ephemeral nature of music, album art in the digital age and the future of music packaging.

Was there any specific reason that you chose to hand-write all the titling, lyric and liner notes for Bon Iver, Bon Iver? Is that your normal handwriting?

As soon as I started talking about the direction we’d take for the art and layout of Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Justin had already decided that he wanted the two Gregory Euclide pieces to be the focal points of the packaging. Euclide’s work is incredibly intricate and organic, so we wanted to make sure that the rest of the layout maintained that handmade, organic feel, and didn’t compete with the images. We made a few attempts at putting together some sort of more formal typography, but it was quickly apparent that the layout needed to feel as simple and personal as possible – tying in to both the images and the general tone and mood of the record.

One of the most amazing things about the Bon Iver albums is how, though Justin’s lyrics can be incredibly impressionistic and really specific to his own experiences, listeners seem to find this rare level of personal, emotional resonance to the songs. They’re evocative in a universal way. I wanted the rest of the layout to communicate that same level of intimacy and personality, and with that in mind, writing it all out by hand was the only way to go. With the black text on a white field, and a few accents of bold red pulled from the center left area of the cover, the layout feels exceedingly simple, but still complete, and doesn’t distract from the depth and beauty of the cover image.

I tried emulating a few styles of handwriting from other sources, but the only thing that didn’t ultimately feel stilted and too considered was my own everyday handwriting. I practiced writing the titles over and over, stretching them out and simplifying them until they felt like signatures. That set the style for the rest of the layout. My own sloppy lazy-dude handwriting, stretched and simplified a little, ended up being a good foil for the lyrics. Making the somewhat obtuse words slightly illegible gives the listener a little more to decode and unravel, which is an aspect of record packaging I’ve always loved as a fan, and something I try to incorporate whenever possible in my work.

I like that idea of giving the listener something to decode and unravel. I felt like there was a kind of heyday of that kind of thing in the late 80′s / early 90′s. Do you have any examples of packaging that you loved as a fan first and then later became a conscious (or unconscious) inspiration?

Peter Saville’s work for Factory and Vaughn Oliver’s for 4AD were both huge influences on me as a teenage music fan and later as a designer, but the example that seems most appropriate here would be the packaging from The Fall’s albums throughout the 80s. As a fan I loved the idea of how they took the unhinged, goofy-but-menacing tone of their music and somehow found a way to enhance that with willfully obtuse artwork. The packaging is just packed with what seems like graphic non-sequitors – nonsensical handwriting and type, dense collages, photos and paintings that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with each other or the music, and seem very deliberately intended to be visually unappealing or at least overstimulating. On some of those records it’s nearly impossible to figure out the names of the songs. But that confusion IS their style, both musically and visually. The handwriting (probably Mark E. Smith’s) and collage feel of the art do much to contextualize the music and add another level to the experience of listening to the record.

That visual style — a seemingly deliberate attempt to merge punk and Situationist imagery (but with no actual cause to advocate) with the idea of outsider art — later became pervasive in indie rock thanks to Pavement (who are largely indebted to The Fall in just about every way possible) and in Stanley Donwood’s designs for Radiohead. Donwood has filtered a very similar aesthetic and tone through graphic design software to suit Radiohead’s fixation with technology. The disjointed images and handwritten text are still there, but it adds up to a much bleaker, more oppressive feeling that suits the records incredibly well. Donwood’s also big on maximizing the potential of physical packaging, and really making opening and unpacking the record an experience. I remember discovering months after the fact that there was a second booklet of artwork hidden behind the tray in the Kid A packaging, and how it drew me right back into the record again. I don’t think that either The Fall or Radiohead’s art is an obvious visual inspiration in the work I do, but they do help to remind me that design and packaging have an opportunity to deepen the experience of listening to a record. It can take a passive activity and make it active.

We’re in a unique time right now for music design. I know that no matter how deliberate the packaging and design of a record, at least half of the people who actually like the record enough to pay for it will likely never see anything beyond a JPEG in the corner of their iTunes. I’m guilty of this myself. The challenge, then, is to find a way to reward the people who are still willing to go out and buy a physical record. I see it as my job to find a way to make it more immersive. That’s not to say that people who download records are listening to them the wrong way – it is ultimately about the music, of course, and the music is strong enough to stand on its own. But if I can give a listener an excuse to actually sit down and spend time with the art while they listen, studying the images for hidden details, or reading through liner notes and lyrics that feel like letters from a friend, then I feel like that can only result in closer attention to the music itself.

It’s such a unique time in music. It seems like the whole system is being rewired — and as is usual with the push of new technology — we lose as much as we gain. I think of that period in the 1400′s after Johannes Gutenberg unleashed the power of mechanical, moveable type. Something fundamental was lost when people moved away from a primarily oral culture to an increasingly literate culture, but there was so much that was gained too. I feel like we’re in another transition period right now, between the more immediately physical version of music to this kind of disembodied format. And there’s such this great art form that I feel is in jeopardy — the record cover sleeve. Not to get too esoteric, but I feel like it’s been the visual art that’s been most embraced by the middle class. It’s been really subversive, I think. You’ve got the gallery guys, and that stuff is super interesting, but often, it just feels reserved for the elite class, even when it’s thumbing its nose at the elite, and then you’ve got advertising on the complete other end of the spectrum, where there’s just very little art, and then in the middle sits the album cover art. That was a long preamble to the next question: What do you do for the digital buyer? How do you translate album cover art for the completely digital age? Do you even try?

There’s a very real challenge in translating it, and I think it’s part of a larger issue with art in the digital age. In an odd way, it feels like this transition is opposite of the one that took place in the move from oral tradition to the printed word. So many things that we’ve taken as a given to be physical objects are returning to an ephemeral state. Music is always ephemeral to a degree – a fleeting moment captured on recording media to be re-experienced on demand. Packaging began as a means for protecting the media – an extension of that capturing of the ephemeral. Eventually its form evolved to copy that function. The entire physical object is an extension of the music. This has fundamentally changed the way we discuss the music itself, both as fans and as artists. Visual shorthand has become such a huge part of how music is contextualized. It’s easy, because up until recently, with the exception of pop radio, album artwork was the first impression listeners got of a record, either through advertising or in the store.

Digital distribution and leak culture have changed this completely. Records find their way onto the hard drives of fans (and eager detractors) sometimes before the artwork is publicized or even finished. And as previously mentioned, even hardcore fans of a record may never see the artwork beyond a JPG. The contextual power of album artwork has been diminished, which is both liberating and challenging. It removes the tendency to try to guide the conversation around a record, or to nudge artists in the direction of a style or movement via visual cues. That conversation begins earlier than ever, and in places where labels and music press have little if any sway. And it forces designers and artists to develop album art that makes a real statement on its own – one that complements the record but does not attempt to define it. It has to stand as its own thing. A thing that has traditionally, by necessity, been defined by the physical limitations of its original purpose: to protect the fragile media within. So what happens to the artwork when it no longer has that limitation and definition? If there’s nothing to package per se, how do we incorporate a visual element into the music?

The options available through most digital venues are limited. In practice most music packaging is translated into a full-screen PDF booklet that incorporates images and text from the artwork. To me this is more of a functional, informational tool – it gives the digital buyer access to lyrics and liner notes. But the necessary limits on file size and compatibility really hinder a good aesthetic translation of the album art. Which gets at the heart of the issue – what is the prime, definitive version of the artwork? As a designer trained in print and a record collector, for me that’s likely always going to be the LP. Everything else is an adapted version of that original artwork.

I acknowledge that this thinking gives short shrift to a predominantly digital audience, but in part I think that’s inevitable. The means for listening to digital music don’t currently leave much room for artwork, or control over how it’s viewed, both now and in the future. Sure, you can bundle videos or digital images with an MP3 download. But go find a CD from ten or even five years ago that included multimedia content. Chances are the first thing you will notice is that the quality is extremely poor by current standards. Digital technology evolves so quickly that it’s not possible to create a timeless accompaniment to the music. The artists I work with don’t want their music to feel dated in a few years, and in the same way I don’t want to bundle a record in digital artwork that’s going to look inept in a few years. The records deserve better than that.

The issue then is to find a way to incorporate digital art and technology into the music experience. In the same way that a great package can be immersive, I like that artists are trying to find a way to create a sense of community around their music that’s just as engaging, but has the ability to evolve and change with technology instead of being frozen in time. Fan forum sites have been around since the beginning of the internet, but I think that much like the way recording technology has been democratized, the access to web development tools has improved, and any band with a computer can put together a portal for their community to come together that’s also a living work of art. To me this is the digital analog to album artwork, rather than anything that is sold with a record.

Since we started this conversation with Bon Iver, I might as well bring them up here as an example. They rolled out a new website to coincide with the new album, and it combines the artwork, information, and social networking potential around the band into something really great. And Justin has really devoted himself to keeping it flush with new content, which is critical. It creates a visual, informational experience that finally matches the ephemeral nature of the music. It doesn’t replace album art – rather we’re moving forward with the opportunity to have two completely different but complementary visual treatments of a record. And in the same way that you don’t exactly have to buy a record to experience it digitally, an artful web presence isn’t something bands or labels are selling to fans. Like the joy of seeing a band live and being in the presence of other fans, it’s more an invitation to experience the culture around the music on a deeper level. It’s this notion that designers, artists and record labels need to embrace, rather than trying to find a way to squeeze our traditional notion of album artwork into a shoe that just doesn’t fit.

One more question for you: what’s next for you? What are you looking forward to?

Between the three labels (Jagjaguwar, Dead Oceans and Secretly Canadian) I do some degree of art direction and/or design on 40-50 releases each year, along with producing promotional and advertising materials for the records and the labels in general. So that keeps me incredibly busy. Most of our upcoming projects are still fairly hush-hush, but in particular I’m really excited about the warm reception given to the new album by The War on Drugs, and I’m looking forward to the upcoming release of Gauntlet Hair’s debut album. Both of these are great examples of artwork that I feel really serves the music well, and both were fun projects to work on.

I feel really lucky to be able to make a living doing something that I enjoy and feel passionate about, so I’m really just focused on continuing to do that. As long as people buy records, I’d like to be able to design some of them.

Dean Wareham, the frontman for Luna, spent well over a decade perfecting his craft before he recorded the dream pop masterpiece Penthouse. A New-Zealand-born New Yorker, Wareham began his career in earnest with the seminal Galaxie 500, a three-piece that predated and prefigured the shoegaze movement. But Wareham had ambitions beyond their modest, but enviable, success. Luna was his next project and three records in, he and his bandmates hit creative gold with their paean to New York and moody nightlife, though not much gold apparently in the way of record sales. Regardless, it was a critical success and Rolling Stone put it in their top 100 albums of the 90s.

The cover design was a great fit for the music, minimal and restrained, with an air of somber sophistication. Ted Croner‘s iconic photos of New York City at night were used throughout. Fittingly, the New York-based designer Frank Olinsky was tapped to create the album packaging. No newcomer to sleeve design, Olinsky had been a mainstay in the industry for years by the time Luna were hitting their stride. Olinsky’s career had taken off when he was a part of the team who designed the MTV logo and had continued to work for bands like the Talking Heads, 10,000 Maniacs, Sonic Youth and Smashing Pumpkins. We had the pleasure to speak with Frank about the Luna album design. While we were at it, we figured we’d ask him about working with his heroes, designing for diverse clients and creating the MTV logo.

I’m a ridiculous fan of Luna, just to get that out of the way. How did you start working with them?

I love Luna too. They are one of my very favorite bands ever. I feel fortunate to have worked with them and with Dean Wareham & Britta Philips after Luna disbanded. I was a fan first. Someone at Elektra Entertainment (Luna’s label) gave me a copy of Bewitched and I fell in love at first listen. It turned out that Luna had the same management as the Talking Heads, and I knew one of their managers from working with her on the Talking Heads’ art book project. She invited me to design the package for Luna’s 1995 album, Penthouse.

How did the packaging come together and what font did you use?

Dean had discovered Ted Croner’s magical photos of New York City and knew they were just right for the package. Three pictures were used: the cover photo of the lit-up skyscraper, a group of light-streaked high-rise buildings, and a blurry speeding taxi. (This same taxi photo appeared on the cover of Bob Dylan’s 2006 album, Modern Times.) I hired Nitin Vadukul, one of my all-time favorite photographers, to shoot the grainy black-and-white panoramic portrait of the band. Everything came together just right. That was the first time I used Interstate, but certainly not the last time I used this font!

How did you get into music packaging design?

When I was a kid I wanted to be a rock musician. I figured that the closest I would ever get was designing album covers. I went to art school, and graduated with a degree in fine art. One thing led to another. I did some illustration, learned typesetting, paste-up and basic graphic design. In 1979, two friends and I started Manhattan Design. We went on to create the MTV logo and that led to jobs in the music industry. After Manhattan Design dissolved in 1991, I continued to design music packaging.

What were some early influences on your work? Did you ever get to work with any of your heroes?

When I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s everything was an influence, especially the music. I couldn’t wait to find out what the next Beatles and Stones albums were going to sound like, and—just as importantly to me—look like. Then came the phenomenal work of Hipgnosis. The images they came up with for albums by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and others just blew my mind.

The musicians I have worked with are my real heroes—at least some of them. David Bowie and Brian Eno, Natalie Merchant. And a few who weren’t my heroes before I worked with them, but whom I ended up respecting enormously, like Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, Kronos Quartet, Dean Wareham, Jimmy Dale Gilmore and So Percussion. Working with David Byrne and the other Talking Heads and all those visual artists on “What The Songs Look Like: Contemporary Artists Interpret Talking Heads Songs” was amazing. I look back at the art in that book, and I can’t believe it really happened.

You’ve worked in such a broad diversity of styles. You’ve done work like Luna’s Penthouse and Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, but then you’ve art designed / art-directed for Sonic Youth albums. Very, very different work there. How do you approach each project?

I try my best to be as open minded and receptive as I can be, and to make myself as invisible in the process as possible. Ideally, I temporarily become part of the band without them knowing it. Listening is the most important thing. Being a fan can help, but that can also lead to disappointment. I try to let the music guide me visually in finding the right artist or photographer to create the perfect image for the album. The best results often occur when a window is left open for surprises and happy accidents.

You just mentioned that you and your studio designed the MTV logo, one of the most immediately recognizable typographic logos in the entertainment industry. How did you approach the creative process on that design?

My studio, Manhattan Design, was in a very tiny room in Greenwich Village. Although this design studio had a very established-sounding name it was kind of a joke. My partners and I, Pat Gorman and Patti Rogoff, chose the name to fool potential clients into thinking we had been around for a while. We didn’t have much experience or money, but we made up for it with spirit and creativity. We weren’t famous and we didn’t know anyone famous, but somehow we managed to earn a living.

A friend of mine from early childhood, Fred Seibert, called me about a project. He was working for a big corporation that was planning a 24-hour music cable television station. He said they didn’t know what they would be showing but they were going to have to fill 24 hours, 7 days a week with it. In those days there weren’t any rock videos; it was all mostly short performance films. Fred said they needed a logo for the station. He said that some established designers had already been hired but he had squeezed some additional money out of the corporation to give us a shot. We began doing many sketches—lots and lots of them. The earliest ideas featured musical notes and other obvious symbols. Those were all quickly dismissed.

At some point an outline drawing of a bold, sans serif “M” appeared on a piece of paper. One of us then drew dimensional sides to the “M”. After that, a variety of groupings of the letters “TV” were added. Everything seemed too normal looking. I thought the logo needed to be less corporate somehow—defaced or graffiti-ed. I took an enlarged copy of the fat “M” drawing and went into our studio’s narrow stairwell with a piece of acetate and a can of black spray paint, and—voila—the MTV log pretty much as it appears today. The three of us then played around with scale and proportion, and after some tweaking the sketches were sent up to Fred. He presented them to suits. We never attended these meetings so I don’t know what really went on, but the story is that sketches actually ended up in a wastebasket several times and were then fished out.

The next, and probably most revolutionary part of the design came about when we were asked to come up with “corporate colors” for the logo. The decision was made that there wouldn’t be any. Knowing that many people were going to be working with the logo made us think that just like rock music, the logo should always be changing—the “M” and the “TV” could be any color or pattern. The concept of a chameleon-like logo was brand new.

The rest is history. Sometimes I think about those days and it seems like another lifetime.

That’s pretty amazing. What’s next for you? What’s on the horizon?

A summer vacation in Nova Scotia. The Atlantic Ocean is on the horizon.

Rhino Records UK released TOTAL: from Joy Division to New Order on June 6, a collection of both bands’ best-known songs. Linking the two makes sense, as the dark post-punk of Joy Division ended abruptly when leader singer Ian Curtis committed suicide. After the posthumous release of their second album, Closer, the remaining members reformed as the decidedly brighter New Order, enjoying decades-spanning commercial and critical success. TOTAL follows the two bands chronologically, highlighting the musical evolution of both.

It’s always been very hard to separate the music of either band from their sleeve art. Peter Saville, a dominating influence in the world of design, crafted a minimal, highbrow ethic for both bands. Saville returned with longtime collaborator, Howard Wakefield for TOTAL. We recently had the opportunity to speak with Wakefield about TOTAL, typography and working with Peter Saville.

Both Joy Division and New Order are very iconic bands. How do you design for “iconic”?

Carefully… A New Order or Joy Division sleeve is very emotive. We had to do something that respected their iconic status, but not casually raid a previous concept or look. Particularly when designing for both bands, which hadn’t been done before… so this was doubly difficult.

For TOTAL, we had to look back to some degree, as it was a compilation and it was merging a memory of both bands. We felt that it should look more New Order than Joy Division because of the time span of both bands and their musical output — this compilation was a journey from the 3 years of Joy Division to the 30 years of New Order after all.

Speaking of iconic, you’ve collaborated with Peter Saville on various projects. How has this partnership evolved over the years? What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on together?

I started working with Peter when I left art college and began by watching, listening and learning. As time went by, with experience and confidence, I got involved more and more creatively. Peter notoriously worked very late and I had to be able to get on during the day, otherwise I would have just spent all day hanging around waiting. The level of attention to detail that Peter expects is second nature to me now, so we will talk about an idea and then I will visualise what we have discussed. Sometimes my interpretation is not what Peter intends, but more often then not I will create something he loves, which was the case for the Somerset House ice rink. He did a quick sketch of some lines going around a box which represented the shape of the building.

My favourite project is a very difficult question — I have worked with some great bands including Pulp (working directly with Jarvis Cocker, which was an honour). And it was while working on This is Hardcore where I introduced the Smart Blur effect to make the photos feel like paintings and add the element of un-reality the photos needed. The design for Suede’s Head Music stands out where we really went wild in Photoshop. Other amazing clients include the identity for Givenchy and graphically re-organising the whole of EMI Group, but I have to say so far my proudest moment was being the first designer to be credited along side Peter on a New Order sleeve — Ruined In a Day in 1993.

What led you to create a completely typographic cover for TOTAL?

There was a more graphic proposal, based on a memory of Closer (which proved too costly), so I suggested concentrating on the title. After all, this is quite a commercial release and I saw a great analogy with the washing up powder inspired ‘Run 2.’ We decided to treat the design as very commercial too. The idea was to have a very large title on the cover (which is not what we would normally do for either band) and out-of-register as if it was printed too quickly to get it to the stores ‘now, now, now.’ The band liked the mis-aligned look but they thought there was too much white space. However the title was already as large as it could go. So I thought, ok if they want less white space I will give them less white space and sacrificed the whole title in favour of my favourite part and zoomed into the letter ‘O’ — it was the sexiest part anyway.

You chose Helvetica Heavy Italic as the type for the primary “illustration.” Why that particular font?

We looked back over all the previous New Order sleeves to determine which font could sum the look of New Order. Was there a style that we remembered before all the others? Most New Order albums including the first one I worked on, Republic, used a different font, so it wasn’t straight forward, but Technique stood out as the most iconic in our memories. Yet New Order itself was not set in Helvetica — Technique was. But it was that ‘title’ and that ‘setting’ that was ‘New Order’ for us, and it was that ‘look’ that become iconic and the most memorable. To add the Joy Division factor, we used it in uppercase which was set for most of the Joy Division sleeves — again how we remember Joy Division.

What’s next? Can you share any other current projects that you are passionate about?

We are working on an official Joy Division website and e-store. I am also talking to some new bands — Peter doesn’t really work in the music industry anymore apart from New Order and Joy Division, but I’m loving it and at the moment, that is what I want to do. We had a meeting with a new band last month and their management were delighted to say that it was so refreshing to talk concepts rather than simply sticking a band’s name on a photo.

For projects that I am passionate — honesty is always at the heart of what we do and the ones where my design makes an impact are really rewarding. We have recently completed the identity for a political party in Denmark where our designs have changed the perception of the party by ‘breaking the mould’ of political design and as a result the design has played a key role in doubling their share of the vote.

We also created an identity for French record label Citizen — it is their 10th anniversary this year and they wanted a logo that that they could identify with. I used a really quirky font called Nova by LUX in San Francisco which I felt was a great analogy for their techno music. Sometimes a quirky font that can be quite difficult to use has use and I was so pleased to join the two together.

Do you have a favorite album cover of all time?

I don’t have a favourite, but surprisingly one that left an impression is Make it Big by Wham! which my sister Rachel owned when we were teenagers. Peter transformed a boy band into something very sophisticated and indicated where George was going. I remember vividly picking up the sleeve and knowing this was Peter’s design, turning over and seeing the hallowed words ‘Design by PSA.’ And it was the realisation that here was a person, who designed for my 5 favourite bands at the time — New Order, Joy Division, OMD, Roxy Music and Ultravox — if he used design to transform a perception, he was the person I had to learn from.

Editor’s note: This article was recently published in SXSWorld Magazine, but we thought it would be very appropriate to share Les’ piece here as well. Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis premiered last week at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival.

For many, it’s virtually impossible to hear Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and not see that album’s iconic light blue prism refracting a sharp rainbow across a deep black background, or to listen to Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and not see the apocalyptic glow engulfing pale, naked, alien-like children climbing across the treacherous rocks of the album’s cover.

Music has always been visual, as well as aural. In the years before cassettes and CDs tipped the world in favor of ever more compact media, vinyl records and their gloriously full-sized 12″ by 12″ covers gave artists a powerful outlet on which to catch listeners’ eyes as well as their ears.

Few have done more with that square canvas than artist and designer Storm Thorgerson and his colleagues at Hipgnosis, the graphic arts studio behind the famous Dark Side of the Moon and Houses of the Holy album covers, along with almost 200 others from the late ’60s through the early ’80s.

Peter Gabriel’s melted face, an endless trail of beds stretching along the shoreline of an empty beach, and a lone floating pig above the Battersea Power Station in London were all images that were either conceived or executed by the Hipgnosis team. Each has left an indelible mark on record buyers and music lovers across the globe.

Filmmaker Roddy Bogawa is one of those impressionable souls. His latest documentary, Taken By Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis, gives an in-depth look at the man and the studio behind some of the most captivating and imaginative album covers in rock history.

The film, which made its world premiere at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, combines interviews and reflections from Thorgerson and fellow Hipgnosis designer and photographer Aubrey Powell with rare, never-before seen photographs and footage from their collections and from those of the musicians with whom they worked. The film also includes interviews with rock legends David Gilmour and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Steve Miller, and Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant. Bogawa also reached out to current artists who have worked with Thorgerson recently, such as Dominic Howard of Muse and Cedric Bixler Zavala of The Mars Volta.

Bogawa began working on the project three years ago after a conversation with a friend led him to The Work of Hipgnosis: Walk Away Renee, a book that helped connect the dots between Thorgerson and the many LP covers Bogawa had grown up with.

“I’ve talked with some people jokingly that this is a film made over 33 years, because really I’ve known about Storm’s work since about the age of 15 or so,” said Bogawa, who grew up in the Los Angeles punk scene, but now lives and works in New York. “Like millions, I had a lot of his designs in my record collection without even knowing necessarily that they were all done by the same people…”

“When I looked at the body of work that he had created—we’re talking major design work that’s pivotal in the music world in how bands were marketed visually—I realized that this was something that was really far-reaching.”

Thorgerson, who continues to design covers as well as produce videos and films, is known for his surreal juxtaposition of objects and people in landscapes and situations where they wouldn’t normally appear. His penchant for distorting reality contrasts with his desire to convert his wild concepts into real, live events without the help of digital manipulation. That image of 700-plus beds on a beach from Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason? Thorgerson actually had his crew drag 700 beds onto a real beach to make that happen.

Rapidly developing technology has made it significantly easier for artists to do digitally what Thorgerson prefers to do physically. At the same time, digital music distribution has not only altered the paradigm through which listeners acquire music, but it has also largely severed them from the tangible experience of looking at and physically handling the art that comes with it. The canvas shrank with tapes and CDs, and now downloading music has practically made that album cover medium obsolete.

Yet Thorgerson’s determined effort to circumvent technology and do things the hard way makes his elaborate, real-world sculptures and tableaus that much more magical. For Bogawa, who shoots exclusively on 16mm film, a dying breed in a world favoring digital video, this defiance of technology resonates deeply.

“The film is a story about [Thorgerson's] life and inherently about his work and the cultural and social importance of his art, but it’s also a film about the growing emptiness that technology leaves in its void,” Bogawa said. “I think the film is really timely in that way and shows that, in the end, we all want to be together, enjoying each others’ company rather than sitting alone in front of a computer screen.”

Anthemic is a word that is thrown around a lot when describing rock music, but there is no doubt that The Hold Steady’s latest effort, Heaven is Whenever, qualifies for this special adjective.

While the band is now based in Brooklyn, vocalist Craig Finn grew up in Minnesota — and echoes of Minnesotan influences such as The Replacements and Hüsker Dü are certainly found on this record. However, the band has most definitely carved their own path of punk-derived catchiness, with Finn’s narrative ramblings garnering most of the well-deserved attention. It’s hard not to sing along to songs like “The Sweet Part of the City,” “The Weekenders” and “Touchless.” Infectious and anthemic indeed.

Texas-based Christian Helms worked with the band to design the artwork for Heaven is Whenever. A founding partner of The Decoder Ring Design Concern, Helms recently started the creative firm Helms Workshop. In addition to designing the packaging for The Hold Steady’s fourth studio album, Stay Positive, he’s worked with premier artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, Spoon, Wilco and many more. He just might know a thing or two about putting together a kick-ass album cover, so we sat down with him recently:

What is the biggest challenge for you when designing a packaging system for a band?

“Bands are really like any other client — they’re all different and come with their own unique viewpoints and problems to solve, so it changes every time around. I like that, and honestly need it. I’m awful at being decorative. I need a communication goal and problem to push against, or I’d have no idea what to do. With THS, we really wanted to find a metaphor to sum up the central theme of the album. It’s all about the contrast between the highs and lows in life, and it turned out the best way to achieve that was by throwing a model into a near-freezing greenbelt in February. We nearly gave him hypothermia.”

You use many wonderful serif typefaces in your work that give a timeless, almost vintage feel. Is this a conscious choice? Do you have any particular favorites that you often use?

“Personally I’m really drawn to vintage collateral and packaging. It surrounds me at home and at the studio, and it definitely influences the work. My goal is to reinterpret rather than recreate, so we try to use those influences as fodder for building something new. I do have faces that I tend to lean on a little more than others, but as of late I’ve been making a concerted effort not to do that. These days at the beginning of a project I’ll actually make a list of five things I’m not allowed to do. ‘No Century Gothic, no misregistration, no orange, etcetera.’ It can be frustrating, but it helps keep me learning and growing as a designer.”

There are two typefaces used on the cover, a nice pairing of Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Archer and Mercury. (Chronicle was also used in the booklet.)

Archer is a slab serif initially commissioned for Martha Stewart Living magazine — a unique typeface that wonderfully blends the Antique and Geometric styles. While Heaven is Whenever doesn’t showcase the ball terminals of the lowercase, it does subtly reference this characteristic in the capital “S” of the band name.

The album title is set in Mercury, which was designed for the New Times newspaper chain. A culmination of over nine years of research and development, Mercury utilizes the feature of “grades”:

In his legibility research with the Poynter Institute, which culminated in Font Bureau’s Poynter Old Style (1997) series of typefaces, Tobias Frere-Jones had invented the idea of “grades” — sibling members of a type family that shared the same underlying geometry, but offered different degrees of darkness on the page. (Unlike the weights of a type family, which grow progressively wider as they get bolder, a font’s grades increase in color without affecting copyfit.) For the New Times, this meant that different regional editions could use different grades to counteract the local conditions of each press, in order to achieve the same end result. For other projects, grades offer the ability to separate typography from its printed medium, so that the type-warping effects of handmade paper, roll film, flat-panel monitors, or retroreflective sheeting can be all corrected for in the font itself.

Typographic heaven? It’s found whenever you combine top-notch talent with H&FJ’s elegant and innovative work.

Before having heard a note of the Arcade Fire’s latest album, I knew that I wanted to write about it. The cover art was immediately arresting and I knew it would be a great excuse to discuss hand-drawn fonts. Not that I hadn’t thought about discussing them already: Dinosaur Jr’s Bug, Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted and The Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim are some old favorites of mine, both in terms of cover and content. Any one of them would have been a proper jumping off place. But, somehow it makes sense to start with this summer’s particular gem.

After having lived with The Suburbs for a couple months, I can firmly place it in my short list of favorite long players of the year, with its themes of isolation and suburban despair and the sleeve-worn musical influences that bubble to the surface. Not, possibly, as immediately accessible as either of Arcade Fire’s previous offerings, my appreciation of this current collection of songs was a slow burn, with a couple of false starts in there. In the end, it was the noise-soaked melodies that won me over, not necessarily the darker ideas of suburban ennui and apocalyptic sprawl.

The album art seems like a perfect foil for the music: dark and moody, obviously familiar yet slightly foreign. The hazy projections of Gabriel Jones‘ photography (art directed by Vincent Morisset) keeps everything slightly out of reach. The letterforms keep their distance as well, mostly by hearkening back to the style of suspense films of the 1960′s. Caroline Robert, the designer who did the treatments and lettering for The Suburbs, told us that she, “…wanted the identity of the album to look like a title sequence of a classic movie. Like a screen shot.” Roberts said that she was really inspired by Saul Bass, the artist responsible for the opening animation sequences of films like Psycho, North by Northwest and The Man With The Golden Arm.

Originally, Robert tried to get the vintage look using existing fonts, but like Bass, she employed her own original handstyle to accomplish her ends. She explained that the cover came together once she started to draw the letters: “I imagined (the letters) as a cutout in the picture. I did a bunch of sketches using a brush then I chose one and traced it roughly in vectors.” The result was something decidedly organic, yet obviously geometric, like the interplay of curving suburban streets up against the straight lines of modern tract-home architecture. For my money, I think Robert hit all those proverbial nails on their corresponding heads, the cover perfectly sums up the inner content of the album.

So, here’s to hand-drawn fonts, arty albums and that kind of generalized ennui of the suburban teenage experience. I kind of wonder if it’s hard to have the one without the other.

I once traded a ’62 Gibson Melody Maker guitar for a ’63 Ford Falcon station wagon.

It was one of those somewhat regrettable deals that occurred more out of the fact that I had a crush on the car’s owner. In catching up with her recently (after more than ten years), I inquired about what happened to the guitar — only to discover that she had sold it to a (now former) member of Band of Horses.

Funny what happens to the objects around us. They have a rich history, and just as often, their own secret future.

Long before the breakout performance of “The Funeral” on The Late Show with David Letterman (not to mention having a track on The Twilight Saga: Eclipse soundtrack), Band of Horses frontman Ben Bridwell rose out of the ashes of a little Seattle band called Carissa’s Wierd. I had the fortunate experience to stumble into a Carissa’s Wierd show years ago at SXSW, purchasing their Songs About Leaving album on the spot. It’s a wonderfully dark punch to the gut — and one that Band of Horses fans should not miss, despite Bridwell’s role being limited to drums and bass guitar. (Mat Brooke, who formed Band of Horses with Bridwell before leaving to start Grand Archives, handled singing duties for Carissa’s Wierd with Jenn Ghetto of S.)

Infinite Arms of course continues the melodic alt-country haze of Cease To Begin and Everything All The Time. While there are no particular surprises, Infinite Arms favors the band’s southern rock soul instead of their more atmospheric efforts. Each song conveys its own deep and detailed story, perhaps reflecting a more refined and mature approach to songwriting. Catchy tracks such as “Laredo” and “On My Way Back Home” bring you coming back for more.

I love it when a band keeps continuity of design elements across multiple records, and Band of Horses has done just this with their three full-length albums. Despite significant line-up changes, the Polonaise font has been a consistent script for the band’s name. Designed by Phil Martin, it provides an elegant fit with Christopher Wilson’s photography used on their album covers (two out of three images being of the night sky).

Mark Simonson conducted an amazing interview with Phil Martin in 2004, just before Martin’s death the following year. A bit of history from Simonson:

“In 1969, Martin founded Alphabet Innovations and, in 1974, TypeSpectra. These companies designed and produced over 400 film fonts for use in the VGC Photo Typositor, a machine for setting headline type. Later, some of these typefaces were licensed for use with text setting machines, and many of them are seeing new life as digital fonts through the efforts of Steve Jackaman of Red Rooster and others (including me).”

Martin was a very interesting character, having also worked as a cartoonist and radio comedian. He even occasionally performed as a lounge singer. After all, this is the man that brought us Helvetica Flair. Concerning typographic purists and his playfulness, Martin commented in his interview with Simonson:

“I was accused of typographic incest before my first year of innovations was over. (‘Inzest’ in German, according to my translator Herr Kramm.) The angry typographers who missed out on getting my franchise called Alphabet Innovations, Alphabet Imitations. If you don’t like my Helvetica Flair, just term me the Marquis de Sade of letterforms.”

I wonder if anyone in Band of Horses realizes that the type designer of their preferred font sometimes performed as a lounge singer.

Regardless, I’m sure they would approve.

So it’s the middle of summer here in these United States. I live in the South, which means a lot of humid nights. Since it’s pretty much too hot to move much, the best evenings are spent lounging on porches, candles flickering, friends sitting around a table with a box fan and a bottle of wine, listening to something or other on the record player. This particular summer has seen Phosphorescent’s album, Here’s To Taking It Easy, on heavy rotation. It’s pretty much perfect southern summer fare — languid and loose, like Carolina in July. Matthew Houck’s meandering vocals provide the perfect foil for nights out in the heat. Maybe it’s because he’s originally from Northern Alabama, I don’t know.

The album cover itself is as sublime as the subtle twang of Houck’s voice. Designed by Daniel Murphy, the cover features a photograph — taken by Houck himself — of a hazy Southern California morning, a menacing wolf overlaid in the background (a recurring theme in Houck’s work). The thing that really sets it off is the decorative font printed in gold metallic, a really exciting and original choice.

The font is Rodin Sans and pretty much the best place to find it is in Dan X. Solo’s Moderne Alphabets. Published by Dover in 1999, the book is a treasure trove of amazing decorative fonts — 100 of them to be exact. As amazing as the book itself is the guy who selected the fonts — the legendary Dan X. Solo. A radio announcer and actor from San Francisco, Solo started collecting antique fonts in 1942, at the tender age of 14. By his early 30′s he was done with the broadcast industry and moved into selling his increasingly large collection of type to ad agencies. In the early 70′s, he started working with Dover on a collection of type books. From Solo’s bio on MyFonts:

I began to supply Dover Publications with mechanicals for books of 100 alphabets on a particular theme. I did 30 of these books over the years, and 30 more of printers’ ornaments, borders, and so forth. Sometime in the 1990s, Dover asked me to digitize books of 24 fonts each, to be sold with a disk in the back. I did 12 of these. The Dover relationship came to an end when Haywood Cirker, the owner and my special friend, died and the company was sold to another publisher. Dover felt that they had covered the type field thoroughly.

Other than a selection of type on MyFonts.com, Dan X. Solo has mostly gotten out of the font business, content to frequent the cruise ship circuit with his wife reading minds for entertainment. I wonder if he ever books porches in the South?

Let’s face it. There is quite a bit of saxophone on this 1982 release, the third album from Australia’s INXS. And much like that piece of fruit you left too long in the refrigerator drawer, not all of the sax solos have, uh… aged particularly well. However, such is the case with many of my favorite bands from the 80s (The Psychedelic Furs come directly to mind) — therefore let us not judge a work too harshly outside its own time. Because there are certain hits that transcend, timeless and undeniable regardless of instrumentation, and such is very much the case on Shabooh Shoobah. Thanks in part to the current 80s revival in some indie circles, tracks such as “The One Thing” and “Don’t Change” are as fresh as ever on what many consider to be a lost record of the decade.

“The One Thing,” “Soul Mistake” and “To Look At You” were actually featured on the soundtrack for the 1984 film Reckless (starring Daryl Hannah and Aidan Quinn), helping to expose the band to North American listeners.

Regarding the typography, the all-caps of Shabooh Shoobah are recognized as Times New Roman Bold (the band’s name at top-left, with some nice kerning to bring the letters “N,” “X” and “S” together). Les covered much of its history in the previous post, so I won’t delve too much there — except to point out that Nimbus Roman, URW’s version of Times New Roman, was released the same year this record came out.

Photographer Grant Mathews and singer Michael Hutchence are credited with the cover concept, which no doubt reinforces INXS’s sexually-charged themes. Today, the cover image feels almost Kubrick-esque with its exposed male torso, dog and mask. These visual elements and the golden text color bring about an archaic and classic vibe, attempting a sort of permanence that the band would struggle towards for years — cut short by Michael Hutchence’s tragic death in 1997.

And out of respect for his passing, we’re going to pretend a certain reality television show named “Rock Star: INXS” never happened. Because it damn well shouldn’t have.