January 7, 2020
January 6, 2020
January 3, 2020
January 2, 2020
January 1, 2020
Let Me Tell You Something Else
The final look at my graphics for THR‘s weekly Heat Vision newsletter is a weird one — instead of six or seven graphics consisting of two weeks’ worth of newsletters, this is six graphics from one week, and, like the graphics from the San Diego Comic-Con edition, six graphics created while I was a convention, in this case, Brazil’s Comic Con Experience. Because, you know, I wasn’t busy enough as it was, doing convention stuff. (Actually, I wasn’t, as it happened.)
These three images were created the night I arrived in Brazil, based on an email request from my editor Aaron; as I’ve said elsewhere, that was the end of 18 hours of travel, and was actually followed by more work, because of course it was. When you factor in the time difference, I think it was 38 hours of being awake more or less, with just a mild restless nap or two in between, all told.
Which explains why, two days later, I looked at that “SCOOP!” — intended as a placeholder for when there’s an exclusive and I’m not available to create a graphic for it, which looked like it may be a possibility at that point for that very week — and thought, “That looks illegible.” (I literally was having trouble focusing my eyes when I handed it in. Secrets from Behind The Scenes!) So, I fixed it.
The same day I fixed that, I got two more last-minute requests. Thankfully, it was the one day of the Brazil trip that I wasn’t at the convention.
At this point, I’ve been doing these newsletter graphics for a little over a year, and 2019 was the first calendar year where they were a constant. We only missed two weeks of the entire year. It’s been a pleasure, really, to do them. I feel like they scratched an itch I didn’t know I had, and I feel more… awake, creatively, as a result. I’m really grateful for the chance to do them, this far in.
Yeah I Heard A Funny Thing
Can’t Somebody See, Yeah
I’m Not The King of Comedy
R.E.M.’s Monster just got reissued in a fancy, expanded anniversary edition — its been 25 years, shockingly, since it was released, which floors me; it came out on the same day I moved to Aberdeen for the start of my second year of art school, and I remember running to the local store to buy a copy before the 4-hour drive there in case I somehow missed it — and, although I checked out the new mix and the demos on Spotify (They’re fine), the thing that I keep thinking about more than anything is the packaging design of the album.
Everyone knows what the cover looks like, that garish orange and the out of focus bear head. The album, famously, is the most-returned CD in history, so it’s a familiar sight to any music fan of the last quarter century. The front cover is okay, it does the job, but it’s easily the most boring visual element of the album. It does the entire package a massive disservice.
Far more than the music — which I really like, to this day — the design on Monster blew my mind. (Perhaps more so, the design of the tour booklet that accompanied the album, which took the basic ideas and ran with them.) There was a bluntness and garishness to the decisions made, whether it was cutting things off in the wrong place or applying color overlays that made no sense, or considering television static as a design element strong enough to carry a booklet page by itself. Beyond that familiar orange cover, everything seemed to purposefully reject received design wisdom and do the “wrong” thing, yet still look attractive and exciting.
For someone in art school, especially someone starting a graphic design course, it was utterly exhilarating. I tried to learn from it by stealing, of course — I did the same thing for my other primary influence at the time, Dave McKean, which is funny to me now that I can recognize how much of McKean’s tricks were also just outright stolen from others — but was beaten back by teachers who told me that I was, simply, doing it wrong.
I was, of course, but not in the way they thought. They didn’t get the aesthetics I was working with, and so argued for the old school as they had to, because it’s what they knew. But what I was actually doing wrong was copying the Monster look instead of applying the attitude. Copying it wasn’t the right thing to do; I should have rejected it and built my own version, using the pop culture influences and mistakes inside my own head. But who is confident enough to do that at such a young age?