// April 20th, 2010 // No Comments » // Art, Design
I was recently contracted by a friend to work on a cover for his new album. His band is called The Strugglers. We worked together on an illustration for the Struggs’ tour of Spain last year and the vibe was good. On the shirts, that is — unfortunately, my services weren’t required for the tour of Spain.
When we started on this project, we didn’t know the name of the album or even what all of the songs would be or sound like. But we dove in anyways. We had some general conversations about tone and feel — all those sorts of things. I was made privy to a bunch of covers from other bands that the client liked.
And I shared random examples of how I saw things evolving. I had these ideas of very graphic executions. Some geometry. Is it black and white? I wanted to push the limits of the legibility of the type. It needed to be strong and more like a little piece of art than a designed cover, so I was thinking of doing everything by hand. I could see it, for sure, but was it right for the music?
Well, the music started taking shape and continually evolved over the next few months. Scott Solter, visionary producer for The Mountain Goats and Okkervil River and others, was brought in. The partnership between The Struggs and Solter produced some really interesting sonics. There are layers. The songs have a strong sense of place. And there was tangible, weighty emotion, even beyond the extremely personal lyrics of frontman, Randy Bickford (he’s the client). Here’s a short quote re: Randy’s music:
“The opposite of histrionic, Bickford offers a subdued palette rich in the fineness of its distinctions”
–Pitchfork
A visual concept emerged of a heart (and the circulatory system). I was still seeing (forcing) a graphic execution, but one with a real sense of hand — close to folk art even, but with dark colors. We didn’t want this to end up cliché, though, so we moved beyond the heart and started looking at medical imagery of the circulatory system (in humans, FYI). These were really interesting once we started layering and distorting to give the images texture. In a way, mimicking the musical production process the band had recently undergone. We were operating with a tentative title of “Cursoring.”
My initial ideas were still way off. The strong graphic approach I was advocating was not the ticket after all. We continued collaborating.
In the end we arrived at 3 “markers” for the imagery that explained the main qualities of the songs and illustrated these concepts in the following ways:
EMOTION: the circulatory system and other physiological imagery. Think synapses and arteries and stuff
HISTORY: a very old tree. Trees are witness to everything around and often live longer than we do
PLACE: an old map of Virginia, specifically Danville, captures the origin of much of the inspiration for the album
We wanted this all to feel heady and deep and lush and old. And here’s what we came up with.
I have to say it was a different, and really refreshing, process for me. It was not the typical need-it-yesterday project. Randy was a great client — respectful of time as well as ideas. And he really helped push the project in the right direction without creating unnecessary work. We see this small step as the first for the album, knowing we want to expand the ideas into a larger, more engaging piece down the line. I’ll be looking forward to that.
Thanks for reading this far.
