April means it’s Record Store Day, and The Drift Record Shop in Totnes are doing something special: Gold Panda and Luke Abbott are playing gigs in the shop!
Another mock-up. The texture wasn’t quite coming through on this one, although there were some nice bits.
So it was time for a bit of a rethink, so we went for loose-based-on-formal, and it seemed to work. So it wasn’t long before Rupert did a bit of jiggery-pokery and had a poster!
The final Record Store Day 2013 Poster – click through to see larger!
The plan is to sell these on the day – the 20th of April – in the record shop, so anybody who comes to the gig can buy a poster too if they feel like it.
The posters on the shop counter.
And some in the window! See you on the 20th!
the first thing on his mind – before what became my work on the Microspores fiction project – was for me to have a go at some book covers for reissues of two of his works, ‘Pixel Juice‘ and ‘Automated Alice‘. Naturally I’d read both of these books years ago, as any self-respecting rabid Noon fanboy would have done. I forgot to do the full hero-worship name-drop on Jeff the last time I blogged about this. Did I mention he’s an Arthur C. Clarke Award winnner?
So once I’d managed to calm down a bit, I got the two books down from the shelf in order to refresh the visual threads that had been squirrelled away in head from the very first time I’d read them, and in no time at all had about three A3 sketchbook pages cluttered with a scatter-burst of ideas.
Pixel Juice is a collection of short stories and other things besides. Going through the thumbnails above, the first one relates to a story about pixellated faces on television (that became a starting point for a Microspore too). The second and third are Vurt feather jobs, just because I was excited that I could be drawing something set in that world, and so did.
The first one of the second row is a story called ‘Bug Compass’ about the boyhood of two characters from Vurt, Beetle and Scribble.
The first image of the third row is from the story ‘Hands of the DJ’. The purple one next to it is the main character of the story ‘Xtrovurt’, a man with a second mouth formed on his stomach who’s on a business trip to New York.
During the book, Alice discovers she has a twin sister, so that’s where most of the duality in these comes from. The second thumbnail is her going down a termite tunnel in the book, as opposed to a rabbit hole.
The third one was me with my eye on the thumbnail market. The fourth was based on a chess game from Through the Looking Glass. The fifth – and the bottom two – are me deliberately going a bit, erm, ‘steampunk’, as the period of the Lewis Carroll books justifies it, and both the originals and Jeff’s book have plenty of clock motifs. Automated Alice also has some analogue computing strangeness in it too.
Moving on through to simple colour schemes and then shapes too, trying to get something that immediately leaps into your eyes and brain. I was trying to work up a duo of colours for each book, making each book different, but based on the same template, so they would all make sense sitting next to other on a shelf.
Moving on to the last rough, I was trying to get as steeped in book-design for a busy market as I could, and came up with these two-stage pieces of long-range typography first, then illustraty bits inside, for the keen. The flies are ‘blurbs’ (an interesting choice of name from an author used to selling books for things that broadcast short ideas, propaganda and adverts, and even ‘advurts’) from Jeff’s ‘Nymphomation‘ novel that also appear in a story in Pixel Juice. There’s a moon in there because there’s a story called ‘Spaceache and Heartships’ all about how planet Earth actually has a second moon that nobody knows about.
I should have said, I did Drift a logo a while ago too y’know. They have a lovely blog, put on monthly band showcases at the Dartington Arts Centre, and host a weekly radio show on SoundArt Radio called The Drift Record Shop Radio Hour, which is archived for free listening, and is one of my favourite radio shows in existence.
Also, Rupert and the Drift crew have taken and put up some wonderful photos of the shop window in the afternoon sun in this blog entry here.
“As featured in the Creative Review blog…” Not entirely untrue, as a The R.G. Morrison record sleeve with some of my hand-lettering released from the stable of my musical pals the Drift Records Collective and Loose Music turns up on the esteem-ed design magazine The Creative Review‘s web-log. I don’t just draw pretty pictures, y’know. I can tap unknown reserves of over-wrought handwriting too.
Octobriana the Communist space jungle amazon is a kind of secret handshake (with a lot of chin stroking) among comicish circles as her origin is so cloudy that she’s considered one of the few Public Domain comic characters.