Look What You’re Doing
Apropos of a Twitter conversation with io9’s Julia Caruso, I found myself remembering the covers for Pulp’s This Is Hardcore singles the other day; the Chip Kidd-esque split images, the unsettlingly intimate photography (which gained a new meaning from the title of the single) and the sobriety of the type (with the band’s name only visible in relief, which I always thought was a nice touch, as if they were disappearing, somehow). This got to me to remembering how much pop music design influenced all my graphic design loves and choices when I was in art school, the way that it seemed to feed into what I wanted to make and, at its best, somehow be exactly what I was into at the time I was into it.
The best example of this for me was Styrolouge’s designs for Britpop also-rans Menswear, whose singles were things of beauty, as superficial and surface and empty as the band’s music – and I say this as a fan, as someone who thinks that they were an amazing and amazingly underrated pop band – but just incredible pieces of design:
The economy of the logo, the hidden type on the side of the image… Gorgeous stuff. Each of the singles from the first album looked like this, an image on a white background, with the logo placed over it, and the title of the single on the top left hand side below boxes, color-coded for each release. “Being Brave” was different, in that the logo was actually printed on the sleeve; for “I’ll Manage Somehow,” “Daydreamer” and “Sleeping In,” the logo was printed on the CD case itself, making the images clean on the sleeve underneath, which the graphic design student in me loved:
(There was also the “Stardust” single, which had the logo printed on the sleeve in silver, fittingly for a song about superficial fuckers, but I couldn’t Google up a decent image of it.)
This was – and in many ways, still is – an example of perfect, ideal design for me. I fetishized these singles, more for the way they looked than the way they sounded (Again, fittingly for a band known more for being made up of former models than anything else). The album, when it came out, had a disappointing cover that deviated from this format and seemed ugly and pointless because of it, and in some ways it broke up my love affair with pop music graphic design until Julian House came along and did everything Primal Scream starting with Vanishing Point. Oh, other people could do smart, attractive covers – See Peter Saville’s “This Is Hardcore” covers above – but it took House’s retro clutter to make me feel like someone was designing just for me again.
Good design is like good pop music. You take it personally, and think someone understands. For awhile, Menswear and Styrolouge made me understand that, and for awhile, they made me a better designer.
(And then I walked away and became a writer. But that’s another series of stories altogether.)
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