...in this retro-eighties-high-tech-but-somehow-still-charming poster for Jose Gonzales by Nate Duval. The US gig posters scene just keeps giving and giving – if only promoters in the UK cared about design in this way.

You can buy it for the giveaway price of $25 in Nate’s shop where he’s also got tons of other great posters and art prints for sale.

Aaron Horkey of Burlesque Design, Minnesota has created this amazingly detailed poster for American hardcore punk band Cable’s reunion tour. It also has the distinction of being the longest image I’ve ever posted. Spotted at OMG Posters.

Matt and Tony are two guys based in New York who've spent the last 30 years collecting vinyl LPs and 45s with funny, quirky and unusual covers. Now they've decided to share their collection with the world at the LP Cover Lover blog.

Here are just some of the many gems they’ve revealed so far:


Soul Snaps drum breaks have been sampled by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and The Prodigy.


Health and safety was a big thing in the fifties


It meant something different in those days apparently...

This, apparently is the world’s first album cover, designed for Columbia by then 23 year old designer Alex Steinweiss. Before this records were sold in generic sleeves. You can read the full story and see lots more images over at Udependent.

Earlier this month many of the music blogs were talking about how mashup master Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) planned to release his latest album “Feed The Animals” in a Radiohead “pay what you like” style. I checked out the website and immediately thought, “feck the business model – this record’s got a great sleeve!”. I emailed GT’s record label Illegal Art to find out who was responsible, and they kindly put me in touch with Brooklyn, NY based designer Andrew Strasser who agreed to conduct a swift email interview for Sleevelessness.


Slv Great sleeve for Girl Talk’s “Feed The Animals”. What’s the story behind the cover?

A.S. Behind every cover there is a story, haha... There are two parts to Feed The Animals – the title, and the image that we ended up with. I do stage visuals when Girl Talk goes on large tours or plays at big festivals, and all of the equipment was seriously just getting eaten up by all of the comotion on stage. We had large inflatable palm trees and halloween spider archways, all from very suburban on-line inflatable stores. As soon as the inflatables would go up, the chanting impatient crowd would just get a hold of it somehow, and we’d just watch a palm tree get sucked right into the organic mass of Girl Talk fans... never to be seen again. When you go on a 30 day tour, and watch this happen every day, you start feeling like you are going on some kind of an expedition to feed the hungriest of animals (we’re animals too for going along with it).

The cover itself does not relate to “Feed the Animals”. I was doing visuals with Gregg in Las Vegas when he opened for Gnarls Barkley, Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, and others for this very exciting and very strange Chinese New Year celebration. The crowd was SEATED, and was mostly a hip hop crowd, very mainstream. There was an MC and of course, he’s going to pick on the sorest thumb of the show, which would be Girl Talk... He kicks it off with “so why are you called Girl Talk anyway, what kind of a name is that?”... I think that he was kind of scarred from having to answer that question in front of so many skeptics. The solution was to do a subtle name change from Girl Talk to GT - not an official name change, just a nickname. Gregg originally wanted the GT flames on a brick wall, but I suggested a more ET/Home Alone kind of image, something that references the suburbs more.


Slv Where is the house? Did you take the photo yourself?

A.S. I was in Virginia Beach visiting my family, and I grabbed my moms 6 megapixel snapshot camera and did some long exposures on the house across the street when they had only one light on, and that became the house. Somehow the shot came out perfect.


Slv Did you really set the grass on fire?

A.S. We were really aiming to set a big lawn on fire and actually do it, but the logistics were absolutely bo-bo, so we didn’t do that. I did a micro scale version of the GT on fire with some twigs and lighter fluid, with help from my lovely sister Dana, and our great friend Lisa Ramsey (who was originally going to be a silhouette in the lit window of the house). We preferred nobody in the shot eventually.

The twigs overlaid on the grass was a good first start, but it didn’t look LARGE it made the house look like a scaled down model. I then turned to fire rendering techniques from some really tacky and cheesy websites where they teach you Photoshop tricks, like how to write your name out in fire, or in gold. I took this knowledge and went really far with it - I embellished the flame with some real shots of fire from our barbecue grill from memorial day (my dad was squirting tons of lighter fluid into our backyard grill).


Slv When did you first realise you wanted to be a designer?

A.S. I don’t want to be a designer. I want to be a musician. I am working on my own album right now.


Slv How did you get your first break? (e.g. the first piece of design work that you actually gave a shit about)

A.S. I started in middle school, someone punched me in the stomach for wearing a Mossimo shirt in the halls and I was so infuriated that I couldn’t wear a shirt, that I started researching ringer t-shirts (very skater style at the time). I took a picture of the tide bottle with a 1 megapixel camera (that was a lot at the time) and went over the words TIDE in paintbrush to make it say ZINE. then i did the same with a Chinese takeout box.

I made about 30 shirts and sold them all to the hottest girls in my middle school through a top secret mole in my math class. He had the in.


Slv How did you first get involved with Greg Gillis (AKA Girl Talk)?

A.S. He used to see me around in the cafeteria in college and vice versa – he looked like Rivers Cuomo and I looked like some big fat nerd who tucked his shirt in and wore a tie every day (this has greatly changed, now both of us have beards and we wear ugly clothes all the time like a bunch of hippies).

We eventually hung out once with our friends Mike Ray (who is redoing the Illegal Art website and brand with me) and Alex Preston (who is now in the band Mittens on Strings and makes incredible hand made shirts). I remember that night begging for them not to shave a Ninja Turtle face in my hair (they gave me a haircut the first time i met them and we hung out).


Slv Where do you work and what are you working on this week?

A.S. I work at home, in front of Google Spreadsheets, managing my clients. This week I’m working on my album, and doing some promotional flyers and banners for a Big Gay Cruise in Fire Island – should be fun! I also attended an event on Monday night for my friend Jeremy Parker’s record release party (Tha Pumpsta), I wore my costume (Turns out Andrew is also a performance artist - check out Bad Brilliance for more info).


Slv What records are you listening to right now?

A.S. Lil Wayne + Feed The Animals is the heavy duo right now.


Slv You wake up in Brooklyn, you’ve had 1,000,000 beers last night and a magic badger offers you any item of food you like – what would it be?

A.S. Nachos with cheese, ground beef, strips of beef, burger meat, cow beefs, pork, pork beefs, raw chicken, dutch chicken, deep fried halved radishes soaked in duck fat, sour cream, guacamole, blue cheese dressing, crab meat lumps, cheddar cheese, nacho cheese and drizzled with lime and tequila and flame torched for like 3 seconds or so.

You can check out lots more of Andrew’s work at his website including some excelllent photography.



Strasser also did the above cover for White Williams’ “Smoke” – you can check out the intriguing story behind it at Paper Thin Walls.

My good friend John Foley of bite! informs me that Adrian Shaughnessy is interviewing legendary graphic designer Storm Thorgerson on Resonance FM today. Storm is most famous for his album covers for Pink Floyd such as the iconic sleeve for Dark Side of the Moon (below). You can listen online at 4pm (GMT) today.

Last night I went to Dialogue, the LCC (London College of Communications) Graphic and Media Design degree show. The work of two graduates particularly caught my eye.

Look What You’ve Got, is described by designers Shaz Madani and Billy Woods as “a celebration of everyday objects we have falled out of love with”. The project featured a collection of household items which had seen better days, and a series of beautifully made posters encouraging the viewer to take a second look at these items in a new light. Unlike many of the show’s exhibits the project was accompanied by a helpful booklet allowing outsiders such as myself with no knowledge of the brief to understand what was actually going on.

I also saw some excellent typographic posters by Niccy Kemp. Unfortunately Niccy’s site is all Flash so I can’t deep link to the posters (or extract a decent image to post here), so you’ll have to visit her site and click on My Work > Monsoon Trust to check out the goods.

The Ministry of Type spotted this great Zune ad in Wired magazine and kindly scanned the pages for all of us to see. Nice use of typography. Original article here.

At a time when music packaging is on a downward spiral, French electro / folk / pop act ALB have generated a surprising amount of publicity for themselves on the back of the outrageously extravagant (and unashamedly retro) packaging for their debut album Magne-Disque. The album even comes with a mini-cover for each song. Catch the full low-down and lots more pics at Sleeveage.

Great cover for this Lindstrom and Prinz Thomas 12" on Eskimo Recordings.



Originally spotted at Iso50.

The Creative Review Blog have a sneak preview of some of the excellent work that’s made it into the Magazine’s 2008 Annual.

I particularly liked these posters for London super-club Fabric, created by Village Green (can’t find a link for them unfortunately).





When Fabric first opened their posters and flyers were of a really high standard, and although the production values have remained consistently high, they never really achieved the heights of the collages created by Love in the club’s early days. Great then to see the club’s design work back to it’s slightly disturbing best with these unusually sinister characters created by Village Green’s Tom Darracott.

This poster for Spoon by Texas based F2-Design is printed with actual 45rpm records, making each one unique.



I'm also loving this one for New York Dolls in Chicago:



There’s loads more great posters at the F2-Design site, and if you’re quick you can snap up some of the remaining limited editions.

Sounds like a band, but The Small Stakes is in fact the name of Jason Munn’s Oakland California based independent design studio. Jason turns out a mean poster, as evidenced by his work below for bands like Broken Social Scene and The Postal Service.



There are loads more fantastic posters for sale in The Small Stakes shop.

I know it’s nearly summer when it’s once again it’s time to create an e-flyer for my favourite client Sancho Panza’s yearly series of boat parties. This year I decided to do something a little bit different so instead of creating the usual interactive extravaganza, I made a poster.



It's accompanied by a simple e-flyer where punters are offered a free PDF they can print themselves. They also have the option to order a high-quality print from zazzle.com. Zazzle is a print on demand service based in the US which allows you to configure your poster with a number of options including paper stock and print size. Unfortunately there’s no equivalent to this service in the UK right now so if you want one and you're not in the US you’ll have to grapple with the not-too-difficult task of paying with a credit card in US Dollars.

Scott Hansen turned up this quirky cover for Robert Fripp & Brian Eno’s excellently titled 1973 release, “No Pussyfooting” (a reference to the quick and spontaneous way the record was created). The music involved passing Robert Fripp’s electric guitar through an analogue tape loop developed by Eno, resulting in a deeply layered piece of what would later become known as ambient music. The visual concept of infinitely repeating mirrors perfectly illustrates the qualities of the music in a simple and striking way – design and art direction at it’s purest.

Nice website for Seattle band Death Cab For Cutie who also have the best band name, ever. A nice balance of Flash, typography, good design and layout, minus 10 points for the silly splash page. We did the 90s already remember? Site by Mathematics.

I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Portishead’s “Third”, an album which has been a long time coming.



The limited edition box set looks pretty sweet too. For £40.00 you get a usb stick shaped like the band's logo, a double vinyl album, an etched vinyl 12" of the frightening Machine Gun single and a limited edition print by Nick Uff.

The box set looks enticing but unfortunately there’s very little info on the band’s shop about what you get. I've no idea who Nick Uff is (turns out with a little research that he's an animator), and no info is given about the 5 “films” which come loaded on the USB drive.

The band have obviously put a lot of effort into the production of the box set, which looks beautiful, but at £40 a pop they need to try harder with their online shop.

If you can't wait three weeks to hear the album you can catch an exclusive preview on Current TV at 10pm GMT tomorrow evening. I’ll be tuning in for sure.

An interesting twist on the usually oh-so-hip graphic design tome, Band ID looks at over 1,000 of what the authors consider to be the most powerful examples of band and artist logos. Unlike the likes of my Stefan Sagmeister book, there’s a small chance that if I put this on my coffee table my friends might actually pick it up. It’s not out till June but you can pre-order it from Amazon or the publisher Chronicle Books. I'm going to order it – stand by for a review soon.

After finding piece of work I liked, it was once again well worth while digging around the studio responsible’s website – in this case One Fine Day. James Joyce's (great name) work is simple, fun and refreshingly direct in nature. I particularly love this "dials" image from the contact page:



You can buy one of James’ limited edition screenprints in the One Fine Day shop.

Get Involved is a monthly club night at The Social in London. They approach a different designer or image–maker to create the poster for each event. Build, Anthony Burrill and Jon Burgerman have all had a go.

I particularly loved this contribution by James Joyce / One Fine Day:



Build's contribution turned the idea on it's head once again, inviting anyone to download their template poster and create their own version.





You can see all the versions of Build's poster at the Get Involved site, where there's also a full archive of all the monthly posters.