I have always been a great fan of artwork for music and I grew up in an era where I was able to see some classic album artwork including Sticky Fingers by The Rolling Stones. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon”, and Dylan’s Blood on the tracks. many artists created their own visual representations and of course the best ones are those that are memorable and well designed.
Of course as I have blogged previously you never please everybody and it still amazes me how people can have totally different interpretations of what they see and ascribe all manner of subjective meanings. The funniest comment I heard all year was from someone who proclaimed that not all opinions are subjective.
With my own musical projects I have been lucky enough to work with some terrific artists. The Small Change Diaries had a string visual identity thanks to Max Wootton. Below is the poster we used for the album launch. Its a wonderful piece of work inspired from visuals from 1920s.
With The Caravan of Dreams, Junko Hosomi who did a sketch of my at a gig in Nagoya which was so great I asked her to do all the album artwork for “Tales of Dark and Light” due for release in 2019
In 2019 I’ll also be launching the “Music for the Head and Heart” platform which is substantially bigger than the OUS project. Matt Horwood did the design for this which is visually very different but fits with the brief perfectly
Visual identities are crucial in communicating with the wider public and I have always invested in hiring the most talented people. In my view the world is better for such creative types and if such great artwork provokes discussion, then that can only be a good thing, can’t it?