The Design Process Behind Classic Album Artwork

Storm Thorgerson is a British designer and artist responsible for more classic album covers than you can possibly imagine one person could create in a lifetime. From Pink Floyd to Audioslave, The Cranberries to Muse, he has produced the most compelling and memorable album artworks of the last 40 years.

An excellent exhibition of his artwork runs in the east-London Idea Generation Gallery from April 2nd to May 2nd, 2010. Part of the exhibition highlights his creative process for a specific case study. Check out the exhibition yourself to see the process in action and in detail. For now, here’s a quick overview:

  1. The Brief. The designer listens to the music (possibly only demos at this stage), reads the lyrics, and talks to the band. These create a ‘brain soup’, from which ideas can be extracted to form the brief.
  2. Roughs. Over a number of meetings/days, the designer meets the band again for discussions, in an attempt to pin-down a theme or big idea. This

    stage is creative, with word-play, honest thoughts, and scribblings. The best are converted to more complete illustrations (the ‘roughs’).

  3. Tests. Once a rough is accepted and a budget agreed, a prototype is often created to ensure that the idea works. Depending on the idea, this could involve the creation of scale models from clay or polystyrene. If everything works, the final models are constructed.
  4. Shoot. A location is researched and booked, possibly for a long-time if outdoors and in uncertain weather. Models are erected and positioned, with help from volunteers if the shoot is big and complex. A wide range of photographs are then taken, under varying light/weather conditions and filters.
  5. Editing. This could be called ‘selection’, where the best shot from the shoot is chosen. This can take several days, if hundreds of similar shots need to be compared.
  6. Artwork. Finally, having chosen the perfect shot, any cleaning-up or final computer editing is performed, before handing over the final product.

Written down like this, the process seems so simple. When you consider that some ideas involve 700 or 800 iron beds arranged on a beach with the tide approaching, you begin to appreciate that it might not be so simple after all.

Imaginary Places: John Hughes's Shermer

John Hughes, who suddenly passed

away last year of a massive heart attack, is best known for writing and also often directing films about teen angst. Anyone who grew up in the 80s or even early 90s in North America probably came across The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, even though some of it is cringe-worthy now, most probably felt some kinship with at least one or two of the characters. Whether you were the princess or the dork, Hughes’s characters are archetypes that resonate with the angsty misunderstood invisibility that many teenagers, even the most well-adjusted and privileged, feel from time to time.

To the less obsessive Hughes fan, these films very much stand on their own as independent productions, but there was a thread that connected most of his characters – they all lived in the imaginary town of Shermer, Illinois, which was based on Hughes’ own hometown of Northbrook. Films set in Shermer include The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Uncle Buck, the Home Alone films, and the National Lampoon’s Vacation films.

Hughes’s Shermer was partly Northbrook and partly a composite of all the North Shore’s towns and neighborhoods – and, by externsion, all the different milieus that existed in American suburbia. In Hughes’s mind, the would later say, Molly Ringwald’s upper-middle class character in Sixteen Candles, Samantha, was a passing acquaintance of Mathew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller, while Judd Nelson’s troubled Breakfast Club punk, Bender, came from the same forlorn section of ton as Del Griffith, the hard-knock but relentlessly upbeat shower-curtain-ring salesman played by John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. (Vanity Fair, March 2010)

When Hughes died, his family found hundreds of notebooks filled with stories and notes – many of them a continuation of the story of Shermer. I would love to know what happened to Samantha Baker.

How Roger Ebert Got his Voice Back

Recently, Esquire published an exquisite cover story on film critic Roger Ebert, who is best known for the decades he spent debating great and not-so-great films with his counterpart Gene Siskel on the popular television programme, viagra 50mg At the Movies. Since the article came out last month, people can’t get enough of Ebert. His blog, which was already popular, has developed cult popularity, he has well over 100,000 followers on Twitter, he’s recently created a Fan Club (inspired by an old friend who also happens to be a successful web porn entrepreneur) and he was a guest on Oprah.

Although there are hundreds of hours of footage of Ebert’s voice in At the Movies, it seemed very unlikely, if not impossible, that he would ever be able to speak again, using anything other than an artificial voice that bears no resemblance to the original. Recently, a Scotland-based company called CereProc used archival recordings to recreate an artificial voice that sounds like Ebert. Although it is still in beta, it even has the potential to eventually take on emotional inflection. CereProc is “an advanced voice synthesis company… [which] creates customized text-to-speech software. Instead of producing flat computerized voices, the company says its voices include realistic, animated and emotional dimensions.” (source)

The company undertakes a great deal of research on, what they call, the emotional continuum to stimulate realistic emotional states in voice reproductions:

CereVoice uses two separate techniques to simulate emotional states. The first is to select tense or calm voice quality. This compares closely with the perception of negative and positive emotional states (however, it also has an active/passive effect to some extent). The second is to use digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to alter the speech to active or passive states. Active states involve: faster speech rate, higher volume and higher pitch, Passive states involve: slower speech rate, lower volume and lower pitch. (source)

Pretty inspiring stuff!

Butch Bakery – Home of the Manly Cupcake

Recently, a New York based company has sought to redress the embarrassment manly men apparently feel when indulging in their love of cupcakes.

Founder David Arrick became agrieved when he read a magazine article that described cupcakes are “pink, sweet, cute, and magical.” His response is Butch Bakery, where “Butch meets Burtercream”. There are currently 12 flavours of cupcake available ranging from Rum & Coke (rum-soaked madagascar vanilla cake with cola bavarian cream filling) to the Beer Run (chocolate beer cake with beer-infused buttercream topped with crushed pretzels).

Butch Bakery is a delivery-only service and although they recommend you order at least 72 hours in advance of when you want your cupcakes delivered, they are currently fully booked and not able to deliver new orders until the end of the first week in March. To quote their website, “Whoa!”

Why Are Post-it Notes Yellow?

A thought occurred to me as I stared at the Post-it notes on my desk: why are they yellow? I turned to Google, but could find no answer on the web. On the off-chance, I decided to ask 3M – inventors of the Post-it – via Twitter.

After much effort on their part, I received a detailed response via email, which included a transcription of an interview that had been conducted to specifically answer my question:

TRANSCRIPT OF DISCUSSION BETWEEN HUGH MURPHY (BUSINESS MANAGER, E-CHANNELS) AND DR GEOFF NICHOLSON (RETIRED, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT TECHNICAL OPERATIONS), 3M RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
(23rd February 2010)
HM: Why were Post-it Notes originally yellow?
GN: “Great question – fantastic question. “
“Guess what – we were in the labs and if you imagine, this is my lab here, and then there’s a corridor, and then there’s another lab. They happened to have some scrap yellow paper – laughs – it’s absolutely true. “
“Now afterwards we had a lot of people who said well it’s got a good emotional connection or…” (pauses) “that’s a load of … whatever.”
“They had some scrap yellow paper – that’s why they were yellow; and when we went back and said ‘hey guys, you got any more scrap yellow paper?’ they said ‘you want any more go buy it yourself’, and that’s what we did, and that’s why they were yellow.”
“To me it was another one of those incredible accidents. It was not thought out; nobody said they’d better be yellow rather than white because they would blend in – it was a pure accident.”
“Just like the adhesive was a pure accident. They are the best kinds of accidents to have, but you have to recognise it – which we did.”
HM: “So who actually invented the Post-it note?”
GN: “There were three people. Spence Silver invented the adhesive by accident. He was trying to make – he was in the business of trying to make stronger better adhesives to stick aeroplanes together –  and we do stick aeroplanes together.”
“He came to my office about 48 hours after I joined the commercial tapes division from the overhead projectors part of the business.”
“I’d been made the new products laboratory manager, and they hadn’t had any new products in about 15 years. They hadn’t had a new product since magic tape, and magic tape was about 15 years old.”
“So he knocked on my door. There were two guys – Spence Silver and another guy called Bob Oliveira. They had discovered this adhesive in 1968 – that’s when the patent was filed – and here we are five years later in 1973.”
“He’s saying ‘Geoff would you be interested in this adhesive?’ And I said yes. Why? Because I’m naïve – I’m naïve about adhesives. I don’t know much about it. And I also believe a certain naivety is important. He asked me if I was interested.”
“He had been trying for 5 years to get any business unit interested in this adhesive so he gave me samples and we started playing with things and we started making bulletin boards. “
“As we were making bulletin boards, and tapes and things like that, another guy who worked for me was Art Fry. He was making tapes for skis – ski tape – things like book arranging tape- Things that you’d put on a bookshelf and it would hold books in place”.
“And he said ‘why are you putting the adhesive on a bulletin board. Why don’t you put it on a piece of paper and then we can stick it to anything.’”
“You know – and that was the three of us that came good. And I was in a management role primarily to defend and go fighting for it”.
“When you get down to it with innovation – a lot of people are required to make it successful. Marketing sales, even the accountants.”
“But you sometimes have to fight for it – and that’s inevitable in something that changes the basis of competition. People resist change.”

So there you have it. Not just a fascinating piece of history, but evidence of a company that are willing to go above-and-beyond for no immediate profit or benefit to themselves. 3M (and Hugh in particular), you rock.

Post-it image by Flickr user zarprey