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I was going to start that post off by saying I’m a big music fan but it felt a) far too obvious (who doesn’t like music?) and b) like someone was going to challenge me to recite the lyrics of an obscure album track. So instead, I want to say that I spend an awful lot of time listening to music and trying to seek out new bands. If I can be wearing my headphones I will be.

 

That also means I spend a lot of time looking at album artwork. Album artwork has to balance so many factors from embodying the music, to catching the eye of a passing browser in both a record store and on Spotify, as well as communicating something about the artist behind the music. It’s a complicated dance, and when it’s done right it’s truly something special. If you’d like to know more about how album artwork has evolved over the years I loved this piece by Herbert Lui.

 

Designing an album cover is also on my bucket list (if you’re a band looking for someone, hi!).

Until then, I thought I’d share a few of my favourite pieces of album artwork. The covers I’ve chosen to share are just the ones that caught my eye as I scrolled through my Spotify saved this morning, so it’s by no means a complete list of great artwork or music I love.

 

PS – this post has turned out way longer than I thought it would because I found researching all of the covers so interesting.

 

Brothers – The Black Keys

The cover for Brothers is an icon in its own right now, but it was a real risk for the band when they handed over the reigns to Michael Carney, Austin Kleon wrote a lovely little blog post about that leap of faith. The bold typographic artwork was a real departure from their previously illustrated artwork. But it was a risk that paid off.

Built on Glass – Chet Faker

Tin & Ed’s work on Chet Faker’s album cover is so stunning I had to pause the album just to look at it. It’s subtle and delicate and leaves you wanting to reach out and touch the pale porcelain hand which is almost suspended, even though you might break it. In their own words the series of still lifes they created for the album talk “about the impermanence of objects, memories and relationships. We’ve used objects that are millions of years old and others that are man-made and very new to create an expanded sense of time and history. The series also explores a number of themes from the album, one of which is strength and fragility and how these two things can co-exist.”

Holy Fire – Foals

Leif Podhajsky is one of the best album cover designers out there. For the cover of Foals second album, he repurposed an old shot by National Geographic photographer Thomas Nebbia. It’s atmospheric and just abstract enough to draw you in. The colours and framing always remind me of a sepia print postcard I carry around of a painting of The Burning of Shelly’s Body by Louis E Fournier, but that’s just me.

Something To Tell You – HAIM

The sisters Haim are well known for their style. So it follows that their album covers all feel a little bit like Vogue shoots in the best way. The music is all about them, about their confidence to stand front and centre and just own their art.

Dirty Computer – Janelle Monae

Every pixel of the aesthetic of Janelle Monae’s latest set of releases has been perfectly calibrated, and the album cover of Dirty Computer is no different. Directed by Joe Perez, it’s heat and glamour with a dark edge. The composition seems to nod to Michael Jackson’s Extremely Dangerous in a way that’s dangerously feminine.

Birthdays – Keaton Henson

I love Keaton Henson’s artwork in general, I’ve mentioned before the King Charles print I have which I’m pretty sure is the inked version of my soul. The slightly horrified ceramic figure on the frosting pink background is just perfectly balanced by Keaton’s own handwriting scrawled across. Nothing quite matches, but everything works.

To Pimp a Butterfly – Kendrick Lamar

There have been essays written about this cover, it’s artistic quality and its political statement, so I won’t wax lyrical here. But I will say it’s captivating, and a testament to the fact that a great idea doesn’t always have to be laboured over as photographer Denis Rouvre put it together in a day.

Melodrama – Lorde

Lorde commissioned Brooklyn-based artist Sam McKinniss, 31, to paint an intimate, blue-lit portrait of [herself] for the album cover, which is all about “nighttime attitudes.” The finished product is something I’d happily stand in front of in the National Portrait Gallery for 15 minutes but works equally well to catch your eye when scaled down in a digital album gallery.

Bankrupt! – Phoenix

This album marked a really important time in my life so its cover has a whole load of meaning that’s personal to me. But I think I would appreciate it even if it hadn’t been the soundtrack to so much. It’s a pixel-perfect still life, a little bit bougie, a little bit modern, a lot of style. I love Thomas Mars’s comments on the choice of imagery “We were naive enough that we thought we were making a masterpiece, that was the ambition […] The peach comes from a totally random illustrator, a guy from California who does illustrations for food labels, marmalades and stuff like that.”

Gracetown – San Cisco

Gracetown owes its title to a laid-back coastal town in South Western Australia so it seems only fitting that the cover of San Cisco’s second full album was designed by local artist Pete Matulich. I love how bright and fun it is, as well as the typography around the image which is set in such a way that it feels like it breathes like the album. Bonus points for the fact that they used the same format for their third album, I’m a sucker for consistent artwork.

Dead & Born & Grown – The Staves

I’d forgotten about how much I loved the lettering design this cover until it came to writing this post and I’m so glad I’ve rediscovered it. It reminds me of the illuminated pages of medieval manuscripts. The use of greens and botanical imagery fits perfectly with The Staves calm and folky tones. I couldn’t find out who designed this one if anyone knows who created it please let me know!

Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend

The album cover that launched a thousand uses of Futura. It’s a classic. I still love it. Fun fact: the Polaroid photo of a chandelier on the cover of the album was taken at one of the band’s earliest campus gigs at St. Anthony Hall house – a venue of some notoriety at Columbia University.

Fugue State – Vulfpeck

Vulfpeck’s video editing has become almost as big a part of their identity online as Joe Darts funky baselines. So I was so pleased to see them bring that style and identity into the album cover for Fugue State as well as their new offshoot The Fearless Flyers.

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This post is a bit of a rip off of a piece I really loved from Austin Kleon, about how he puts his newsletter together. I’d highly recommend giving it a read. I mean I loved it so much I wanted to write my own version, to give you a behind the scenes look at how I put together some of my favourite weekly content – and how you can sign up right at the bottom of this page.

 

I’m a big fan of newsletters. They’ve probably overtaken blogs in my heart when it comes to reading content from creators (and even some brands) I love. Anne T. Donahue’s is a standout example amongst those, and is a big reason I started my own.

 

Pulling together my newsletter is also one of my favourite things I do associated with this blog. I think I enjoy it more than writing new posts, even though it’s probably read by fewer people. I love pulling out the best of the web, doing slightly looser illustrations and having the opportunity to be a little bit more personal.

 

I realise if you’re not subscribed to my newsletter, you’ve got no idea what I’m going on about right about now. So here’s a link to one of my past newsletters.

 

As you can see my weekly update is split into three key sections each with their own little image. Here’s how they all come together:

 

The Intro Section

This is where I like to share something of a more personal update. I like to reflect on the week and some of the things I’ve learned or give a bit of a nod to some of the things I’m working on this week. I generally sit down to write something on a Friday evening, no plan, no structure, then give it a bit of a tidy up when it comes to scheduling my email in MailChimp on the Saturday. I try to pick a fitting image from my vast stocks of instagram illustrations or things from past blog posts in part to save time and in part to tie my rambles to work people might know.

 

The Two Articles

Then I move onto sharing two of my favourite articles from the internet for the week. The internet is a big old place, and it’s full of gems but they can be hard to find so I like to share a couple of recommendations. They’re normally arts/creativity/design based but the main criteria is 1) did I enjoy reading it? 2) do I think other people will enjoy reading it? That’s it. To accompany those articles I like to put together some animated illustrations. These usually include the title of the article handwritten out plus either some images from the article or an illustration of one of the key ideas. I draw frame by frame which is why they’re usually quite simple, then animate using an online gifmaker.

 

The Social Share

The final section of my newsletter is all about sharing some of my favourite people on instagram. I like to see it as my way of fighting back against the algorithm and helping my readers find some incredible artists they might not have discovered otherwise. Because of that, I generally try to highlight smaller artists on the platform, but there’s no hard rule. I just add interesting accounts to my collection through the week and then pick out one I like on a Friday or Saturday. I also take reader suggestions, so if you have an idea of someone who should be included please do let me know! Along with a small intro to their work, I show a few examples of their recent, or my favourite, posts so you can get a flavour of their work.

 

If you like the sound of it, you can sign up to receive my newsletter below:

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There are few gadgets that have come back from the brink of extinction as powerfully as the instant camera. Over 7 million were sold last year alone. So, today I thought I’d delve a little deeper into the history of the original instant camera, the polaroid land camera.

The story goes that the idea for the polaroid camera came to Edwin Land in 1943 while on holiday with his family when his 3-year-old daughter “asked why she couldn’t see the vacation photos her father was taking “right now.”” Rather than chiding his daughter’s impatience, Land, who had just founded the Polaroid Corporation and created the first polarized camera filters (tech which you’ve probably taken advantage of when putting on your sunglasses as it reduces glare).

So, Land and his engineers at Polaroid started developing the technology to allow for instant photographic gratification. They began with creating peel-and-develop film, first in black and white, and then, eventually in colour. They debuted the “first one-step dry process for producing finished photographs within one minute after taking the picture, at a meeting of the Optical Society of America on February 21” 1947. This film was the game changer and was quickly put into practice as part of the Model 95 Land Camera.

That camera went on sale for $89.95 (that’s the equivalent of around $950 today) in the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston Massachusetts a year later. In under a decade Polaroid had sold over a million cameras in 45 countries.

The Model 95 was the blueprint for all Polaroid Land cameras over the next 15 years. In fact, it wasn’t until 1972 that the Polaroid camera we all know and love was born. That camera was the SX-70 Land camera, a fully automatic, motorized, folding, single lens reflex camera with film which automatically self-develops in daylight. This camera was what Land had in mind, 3 decades earlier, in 1943 when he first dreamed of instant photography. Owen Edwards at the Smithsonian Mag writes:

“Sam Liggero, a chemist who spent several decades as a product developer at Polaroid, told me recently that Land had long envisioned an SX-70-type camera, involving a self-contained, one-step process with no fuss and no mess. Liggero describes Land as someone who “could look into the future and eloquently describe the intersection of science, technology and aesthetics.””

That intersection of science, technology and aesthetics can be seen in Land’s keen eye for marketing as well as his cameras. He famously had red and yellow tulips flown in from the Netherlands for the launch of the SX-70 because they hadn’t quite perfected the colour film yet, and red and yellow were the colours which looked the brightest. So when the members of the shareholder’s board arrived, eager to try their new cameras out, they were sure to get the best shot.

Land’s camera hit peak popularity with the debut of the OneStep Land camera in 1977. The OneStep was cheap, easy to use with its fixed-focus, smooth to use, fun to carry and the best-selling camera in America. It was also Land’s 500th patent, leading to him being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, because he never stopped making things a new.

Unfortunately after Land’s death in 1991, due to a rise in competition and a quickly evolving digital landscape, Polaroid and their instant cameras’ fates changed.

In 2008, sensing Polaroid’s imminent closure of its film factories. A group of former employees bought a Polaroid film factory in the Netherlands. The company was called The Impossible Project. The Impossible Project kept the instant camera in Land’s original format alive, because as they say themselves “decades on, there’s still nothing like a Polaroid Original.” Their passion for the Polaroid camera, I believe, went some way to reinspire popular love for the instant format. As soon as the polaroid was hard to get, as soon as it became vintage rather than outdated, it was desirable.

Today, Polaroid don’t have the monopoly over the instant camera market they once had. In fact, they’re outsold by Fujifilm’s equivalent. Their equivalent is so similar that Polaroid are attempting to sue Fujifilm for millions of dollars as they claim the “square form” of Fujifilm’s Instax Square photos is “essentially identical” to the trademark and trade dress rights owned by Polaroid. But if you look past those legal issues, Polaroid’s name, if not its cameras, are still synonymous with instant photography. How many times have you heard one of those little square photos being called a Polaroid rather than anything else?

Polaroid’s phoenix like rise says a lot about the nostalgic power of great design, and of our desire as humans to hold our memories in our hands instantly as tokens of what we’ve experienced.

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Elena Varvello’s Italian thriller was my second holiday read this year. It was a book I picked up on a whim to fill my beach reading quota and I’m so glad I did. Part crime thriller, part coming of age story, Varvello’s first novel to be translated into English is full of tension and it certainly kept me turning pages, even while cooking.

 

In lieu of me writing a summary, I thought I’d share the introduction from the back of the jacket:

“1978.

Ponte, a small community in Northern Italy. An unbearably hot summer like many others.

Elia Furenti is sixteen, living an unremarkable life of moderate unhappiness, until the day the beautiful, damaged Anna returns to Ponte and firmly propels Elia to the edge of adulthood.

But then everything starts to unravel.

Elia’s father, Ettore, is let go from his job and loses himself in the darkest corners of his mind.

A young boy is murdered.

And a girl climbs into a van and vanishes in the deep, dark woods…”

 

Intrigued yet?

 

As a crime thriller fan, I definitely was. Can you hear me? is split into two narratives, the first being a violent thriller. Within that plot, your attention is mainly focused on the story of that young girl who disappears into the woods. While Varvello hasn’t constructed your classic whodunnit mystery, there is always enough left unsaid to keep you reading even when your pasta is about to boil over. There’s also a good deal of quiet horror, it’s a novel, because it lacks the formula of a procedural drama, that deals well with the terror of those who are left behind in the wake of violence.

 

The other half of the novel is dedicated to Elia’s own coming of age story, which is a tale of infatuation, friendship, and a first foot into independence. Personally, I was much more invested in the thriller half of the novel, but I never felt Elia’s coming of age was a burden to read. In fact, I felt the thriller plot fed well into the bildungsroman, because as Elia becomes a man his father begins to unravel in front of him.

Varvello “says in a brief foreword, the book is partly autobiographical. Varvello’s father had bipolar disorder. She has, she explains, mixed the invented Elia’s tale and imaginings with her “own story”” This autobiographical detail means the mental health aspect of the novel is handled sensitively, despite the violence perpetrated by its bipolar character. I think it’s worth putting in the reminder here that while over a third of the public think people with a mental health problem are likely to be violent – in fact people with severe mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, rather than perpetrators, of violent crime.

 

I agree with Joanna Briscoe’s conclusion that a full memoir of Varvello and her father would have certainly had weight. However, I think the blend of personal experience and imagined narrative works well here, even if it stalls in places, because it widens the appeal of an account of living with a parent with bipolar disorder.

 

Because of its split narrative I can see Can you hear me? appealing to a wider audience than your average crime thriller. So, if you’re on the lookout for a holiday read which will keep you on the edge of your sunlounger, then look no further.

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ

  • How well do you think Varvello manages the dual narrative structure? Did either story catch your interest more?
  • Elia narrates both stories, how reliable is he as a narrator?
  • Can you hear me? is set in Ponte, what impact does its Italian backdrop affect the feel of the novel?
  • Varvello has been compared to Ferrante, other than a shared first name, can you see any similarities between their works?

 

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

  • As normal, I’m starting with a Guardian review. Joanna Briscoe’s hones in on the tension in the form of the novel, and critiques the moments where Varvello doesn’t quite resolve that tension.
  • The Lonesome Reader’s review is much more in line with my own experience of the novel – however, it’s far better written
  • If you’re looking for a more indepth intro to the book before you read it, The Criminal Element sets the story up nicely
  • Short but sweet, The Independent’s review is probably my favourite

 

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

  • Truman Capote’s, In Cold Blood
  • Alice Sebold’s, The Lovely Bones
  • Terri Cheney’s, Manic: A Memoir
  • Elena Ferrante’s, My Brilliant Friend
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I’ve been working more and more with colour recently, especially in my weekly patterns, which has forced me to really think about how I put together colour palettes. It’s something I’ve definitely gotten better at over the years, through trial and error and from trying to replicate colour schemes I like.

 

Here are some thoughts on how (after many failed attempts) I create a coherent colour palettes for whatever I’m making, whether that’s an illustration, a branding project, or picking out an outfit.

 

Before we get into how I put colours together, here’s a quick intro to colour theory.

 

The colour wheel is the basis for pretty much everything in colour theory (example above). It’s made up of primary colours (red, yellow, blue), secondary colours between those (orange, green, purple), and tertiary colours between those (red-orange, orange-yellow, yellow-green, etc.). Colour theory offers some basic frameworks for picking colours that work together. I’ve outlined a few below, but I’d highly recommend you watch a great 6 minute Youtube video called Beginning Graphic Design: Color if this is all new to you.

Monochromatic – a colour palette which uses a single hue (colour) from the colour wheel and just plays with saturation (how vivid the colour is) and value (how light/dark the colour is)

Analogous – a colour palette based on a set of hues all close to each other on the colour wheel – a good example being the classic warm or cool palettes you see

Complementary – a colour palette which uses two opposite hues on the colour wheel for a pop – the red and green of christmas is a good example of this one

Split complementary – a colour palette which uses three hues one from one side of the colour wheel and the two adjacent to the first’s complementary colour (I made a diagram for this one because it’s hard to describe)

 

Using that knowledge and through some trial and error there are now really three key methods that I use to put together a colour palette:

  1. Analogous or monochrome with a complementary pop – The most common structure I use is to pick a few analogous hues or even a monochromatic base for the majority of my colour palette then pick out a complementary colour to add a pop. This gives you something harmonious range of colours, without it feeling too boring.
  2. Analogous with an accent – Sometimes using a complementary colour as a pop can feel a bit to bold, so in those cases I stick with analogous hues. I pick out four analagous colours, playing around with saturation and value but generally keeping them a little more muted. Then I pick a colour just at the edge of that range and create a brighter accent colour to use as an accent.
  3. From nature/photos – Then sometimes I come at it from a completely different angle. As a lot of my patterns draw from real life, I quite often use reference photos not just for the structure of my illustrations but also the colour. I have a hunt for a photo I like and then I pull out the colours I think work. This usually works particularly well with nature based images in my experience. I tend to try and pick out colours that already sit nicely together, or are natural shadows. Then I go for anything unusual that catches my eye. I usually use the Pantone studio app to help me with pulling those colours out and creating a palette I like, but there are loads and loads of tools out there you can try, or you can just do it within any digital design/illustration software you’re using with a colour pick tool.

 

As a rule of thumb the majority of my colour palettes are based on five colours. But you can certainly use more or less. In fact you can bend pretty much any of these methods, which is what I do all of the time, because all they’re really just guides to point you in the right direction.

 

If you have any top tips for putting together colour palettes or any favourite tools/sites for inspiration please do let me know! I’m always on the hunt to learn more.

 

Happy colouring!