In which we return and begin again, with two weeks’ worth of THR newsletter graphics.
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?
Making Plans In Public To Make Myself Say Yes
A random idea that I’m posting here in the hopes that it’ll prompt me to actually do it next year. I was reading the Draplin Design Co.: Pretty Much Everything book the other week, and there’s mention in there about how the company — really, its founder, Aaron James Draplin — approaches the corporate website, which could best be described by the phrase, “As if it was his personal zine from the 1980s,” which I respect the hell out of.
One thing he mentions — followed by a few pages of examples — is the graphic of the day, which is literally what it sounds like: each day, there’s a different graphic on the site, created by someone at DDC. I read that, and I thought, I want to try that.
Kind of.
One of the things I’ve done this year has been keep up this site in a more organized, intentional way. It was a discipline and an experiment at once; I came into 2019 a different person than I’d been and in a different life, and there was something about actually writing for myself here that felt like an important part of that — of rediscovering what I’d write here, given that chance, but also, of doing something for myself. I knew my limits, so I didn’t try to do daily posts, but I also knew how lazy I was and how easily I’d give up without structure, so I decided I would try to post three times a week. That seemed reasonable.
(I keep forgetting that this wasn’t a New Year thing for me; I started midway through January, for some reason.)
Anyway, so I’m thinking I’ll try to do a graphic of the workday thing, running Monday through Friday each week through all of next year, with the following rules to make things easier for me:
- The graphics can be old or new.
- The graphics might be photos, sketches, graphics or whatever else I decide. A visual element of some kind.
- The graphics don’t have to be by me, although ideally they’d predominantly be.
I figure that I’ve had enough fun doing the THR graphics weekly — and that it’s been refreshing enough creatively — that this could be something good for me. If I choose to actually do it. I even have a name for the series, if it happens: 2020 Vision. Because, you see, it’d run through 2020.
Now. Let’s wait to see if I actually end up doing it.
All That You Do, All That You Say
This Is What Exhausted Creativity Looks Like
Another set of graphics for the THR newsletter; the first three were created at the end of a very long day at New York Comic Con, when I was utterly done and yet had these to do before sleep. I was quasi delirious (I’d worked for about 18 hours by that point, with breaks for eating and con socializing, which to be honest, I count as working), and pretty aggressively just wanted these to be done. Yet, looking back at them, I kind of like them…? Maybe exhaustion is the key to creativity or something.
There was an alternate version of this one made with a different headline…
…but neither one got used on the intended date. (They’ll maybe show up at some point; it was for a story about Catwoman casting in the new Batman movie that never ended up in the newsletter.)
Spins A Web, Any Size
Normally, these posts are a couple of weeks’ worth of newsletter graphics per post. This time, it’s just one week because I was unusually asked to do six at once. (Well, technically, six for one newsletter; I did them in three batches of three, one, and two images, respectively, across two days.)
Of note is the Spider-Man one, which I’m particularly happy about because it meant that I got my own Spider-Man drawing — yes, I did that one — out in public. I don’t know quite why that feels like such a big deal, yet it somehow does…
Signs and Wonders
I’ve Got No Mind To Worry
I Can’t Walk Out, Because I Love You Too Much Baby
One of the strange things about posting these graphics up here is, sometimes I post graphics that we ended up not using for one reason or another; maybe stories didn’t run, maybe they ran outside of the newsletter and so didn’t need the graphic, or whatever. If I had any sense, I just wouldn’t run the graphics, but normally there’s such a gap between doing the graphics and me posting them that I simply don’t remember what we ran and what we didn’t. This time, I know for sure we didn’t run the Adam Brody graphic but, fuck it; I really like it, so it’s here.
Two variant versions of this one. I went with the top, but I’m not sure I made the right choice.
