Paul McCartney’s New
type eh?
Graphic design and typography
Posts Tagged ‘ music packaging ’
No doubt about it
Love the graphic quality of the new artwork for No Doubt’s long overdue collection of songs. Oh, the music isn’t too bad either.
Go to El Mac’s website to find out how he created the paintings.
Garbage in, garbage out
Well not exactly.
The new CD from Garbage, seven years in the making, features some typographic niceties on the cover and inside the CD booklet. The lower image should be zoomed. There’s plenty of interesting … and, dare I say, creepy imagery.
Bifur: What’s old is new
The typeface Bifur was designed in 1929 by the Ukranian-French artist and graphic design teacher, A. M. Cassandre.
When I was studying design, my classmates would look disdainfully on any student considering Bifur for an assignment. It was the antithesis of what we considered modern graphic design: The trend at that time relied almost entirely on sans serif typefaces, namely Univers, Futura, and Helvetica.
Imagine my surprise (and delight, I must say) when I saw the type on the cover of a CD by Natasha Bedingfield. The type is cleverly worked into the CD and booklet cover with a row of parallel lines emerging from Bedingfield’s dramatic eye makeup on the cover, and then through the addition of the 5 line music notation seen in the last photo below.
Read more about Cassandre’s work and the Art Deco era in general here
Can you repeat that?
The music of Philip Glass is full of repeating patterns and variations.
The cover artwork of a 2011 CD of Glass’s music played by the string quartet, Brooklyn Rider, captures the essence of the music using the technique of repeating and rotating a graphic shape. Rendering the form of a violin as if it were a topographic map adds another dimension to the design giving depth and allowing color to be explored in a progressive fashion by using tints and shades.
Read this article on NPR about the music
A little bit country
I was initially struck by the typography on the CD, which also appears on the back cover. But the design is more interesting in the circular shape. The sepia photograph and the selection of a clarendon typeface all lend the packaging an appropriate old country appearance.
Notice too, all the small details like the typographic rules and decorative touches that expertly unify the spaces around the words.
What are letters?
This CD cover for a well known jazz musician reminds me that letters are simply symbols for sound. Our alphabet is an arbitrary code that we have to learn in order to understand language
These icons are also symbols for a sound, but the code is not our familiar alphabet.
A hint: the globe represents the letter A.
A car window: the perfect canvas for type
I thought this was a clever idea.
It’s rather subtle, especially as your eyes go to the dominant image of Ms. Lopez. But once you see it—the aha moment so to speak—it’s a nice little bonus. The steamed up windows of the car become a canvas for Jennifer Lopez’s latest CD track titles.
I would assume this was done after the photograph was taken, but who know, perhaps Ms. Lopez has brilliant handwriting in addtion to all her other talents.
Charice logotype
Why is there a W on this CD by Charice?
Well look again at the word / logotype of Charice. The W is simply the result of cropping tightly to the letter A from the logotype.
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type eh? 