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Over at Hardformat.org, you can check out a growing historical collection of music-related print and package design including vinyl, CDs, cassettes and more. With music formats evolving so quickly and modern physical packaging following vinyl into the category of fanatical collection, music-related design is becoming more obscure. Hardformat is aware of this and has created a place to find and admire both old and new music design work.
“It seems like everybody’s talking about the end of physical music media. Who knows whether they’re right or not, but Hard Format is a little place we’ve set up to celebrate our love of brilliant music-related design.”
While perusing their designs, I came across some great designs for a 2002 Sigur Rós compact disc and a 1981 Kraftwerk vinyl.
Wordle is a simple and fun tool to generate typographic word clouds. It may only seem like a time-waster at first, but if you take a look at the gallery you can find some very clever word combinations and descriptions that are great examples of typographic solutions to design problems. The above word cloud includes all the major words from my last few posts, but there are more in the gallery that go as far as to include entire novels.
There has been a lot of talk and complaints about the new Google favicon lately. I’ve found it to be both too indistinguishable and unfamiliar to be able to recognize it immediately as Google.
One of the main purposes of the favicon is to act as a shortcut icon that will help you find a saved bookmark in your browser or an application on your desktop. Such a change of this icon completely disrupts what users are comfortable with and familiar with, which is extremely important when it comes to any interface or application.
Luckily, Google listens to its users and has decided not to close the door on the issue. And now if you have an idea for updating the Google icon (or gcon! no?) then now you can submit your favicon design to google and have your celebrity forever cemented in 16 pixels of stone, or at least until the next update. Beyond that, don’t expect to be compensated for fixing Google’s branding problems. Seems a little like spec work to me…
This is an oldie but goodie by Alan Becker.
You can also now play a video game based on the animation here
Prolific poster artist Alton Kelley passed away on June 4, 2008 at the youthful age of 67 from complications of osteoporosis. Kelley’s distinct concert posters for artists such as Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture.
Kelley’s posters were heavily influenced by a wide range of historical art styles including Art Nouveau, Art Déco and Bauhaus, but also borrowed styles from Native American and Chinese artwork.
It has been a tough week for Rock ‘N Roll as Kelley’s death comes just two days after the death of legendary rock guitarist Elias McDaniel, better known as Bo Diddley.
The New York Times is running a story in which you can read more about the work and life of Alton Kelley.
While I prefer not to use TrueType fonts, building your own over at FontStruct can be extremely fun. The tool lets you build fonts using geometrical shapes arranged in a grid pattern, save them as high-quality TrueType fonts, which in turn you can use in any Mac or Windows application.
If you’re feeling short on inspiration, you can browse the user gallery and download a wide variety of fonts. Digital fonts certainly have their limitations, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be creative and useful.
I recently created an mp3 e-card for pop rap artist Tyga. His debut album, No Introduction, is being released by Decaydance Records on June 10th.
Tyga is the cousin of Travis McCoy of Gym Class Heroes and achieved his first recognition opening for Fall Out Boy and Gym Class Heroes during the Young Wild Things Tour in late 2007. He’s also received much acclaim and admiration for his top notch performance with Lil’ Wayne at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.
You can listen to several songs on the e-card, including his first single “Coconut Juice”, which samples the chorus from Harry Nilsson’s 1971 hit, “Coconut”. As you may know, Tyga is certainly not the first to channel his/her inner Harry Nilsson.
Tyga E-card | Decaydance Records | 2008
