A Couple of Designs for Screenprinting*

I would like to have another go at screenprinting but none of my usual work (whatever the hell that is) is really suitable. So I knocked out these two *illustration* pieces that might be worth using:

Dogshit Rose is the first in what may be a series of prints, whereby I take an image and caption it with a word that is just plain wrong. Here we have a rose, which most people associate with a nice smell, and the word "dogshit", which most would associate with a bad smell.

I like the use of the single word "dogshit", over the more common "dog's shit" or "dog shit". I like the words "dog" and "shit" as well though, in their own right.

My other screenprint candidate is The Colourful World of Innards:

It would make an ACE t-shirt. It is also a great name for a band. It may be a bastard to screenprint though due to the number of colours. Fucksticks.

*Both these ideas came to me when I was stricken with a heavy cold. Interesting...

Music Poster Project - Final Designs

Of course I couldn't just leave it there. With a week to go until the final crit, I had plenty of time to come up with a better idea, surely. Here's the first one:

I like the look of this one, although I don't think the concept behind it is as strong as my earlier efforts. I am rather fond of the Japanese emoticons. To make it even more Swiss, here's a red version:

Okay, so that's another new idea. I do quite like it but perhaps not as much as some of my other designs. Ho hum. Next!

We have a winner! This idea kind of popped into my head when I sat down and really thought about the lyrics in Psycho Killer. He can't seem to face up to the facts, he's tense and nervous and he can't relax... wait a minute... how about presenting this as a giant A1 psychiatric assessment form!

I scoured the 'net for various forms, especially American ones (Talking Heads are from New York) and then designed one of my own. The main section is a series of yes/no questions, such as:

Able to face up to facts?
Tense?
Nervous?
Can relax?

My personal favourite is:

Sleeping well?      Yes/No     If no, why not?    Believes his bed is on fire.

Oh how I laughed. No, really I did. Anyway, there it is. Many of the real forms had a barcode at the bottom. I saw this as an opportunity to add one of those cool-looking QR codes. If you scan this with a smartphone, you will be taken to the song on Youtube, so you can listen while admiring my poster!

Music Poster Project - Further Development

I decided to stick with the solid block of text in the middle of the page. I toyed with off-setting it slightly to cause discomfort but realised that it ended up looking like I had just designed the poster badly!

Anyway, here's the block of text set in Impact:

Then I had the idea to add extra psychosis to the text with a nod to Saul Bass:

Pretty cool but I figured it was just a bit too much, so I opted for a compromise:

Here it is in the middle of the page, with secondary information about the song/artist added to the bottom-right corner for balance:

I then tried a version in a disgusting green colour, in an effort to make the poster more unsettling:

There's something I quite like about this one, although it has a major flaw - the hideous green colour is not really very disturbing. In fact, it is quite calming... FAIL!

I do like the subtle radial gradient in the corners though, so I tried a version in white/grey:

Here's a closeup on the secondary data from the bottom-right corner:

That's much better. Now if only I could just leave well enough alone...

Music Poster Project - Moving Forwards

I decided to stick with Talking Heads' Psycho Killer from this point forward, and in particular the first verse:

I can't seem to face up to the facts,
I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax,
I can't sleep 'cause my bed's on fire,
Don't touch me I'm a real live wire.

 First up, I decided to take the "live wire" bit literally:

See what I did there? I thought it might be an idea to hook the wire up to car battery or something, so that it actually delivers a shock to anyone stupid enough to touch it. It's not like they aren't warned!

My next idea was to use a font that looked like stab wounds. The plan was to print this then cut the letters out with a scalpel, showing a blood-red piece of card underneath. It was a bit shit to be honest:

Why do I include my bad ideas here? I don't know. Then I hit upon the idea of having the text really tight and constrained to reflect the "tense and nervous" lyrics. I thought it would look good to have this little block of neurotic text swimming in the vastness of an A1 sheet:

For added tension I thought that the text should be uncomfortable to read:

Or maybe:

In the end I decided to use the typeface Impact and set it in a strict block:

This seems like a good point to end this post. The next thrilling instalment follows shortly, after this message from our sponsors...

Music Poster Project - Initial Ideas/Experiments

The brief was to create an A1 poster based on a song or a piece of music, using only type and no other graphical elements.

The first song I looked at was Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division. My first idea was a bit of a lame pun but there is something I quite like about it:

The typefaces and colours were just placeholder at this point, I just wanted to test the concept...

Bit of a painful pun but sometimes these things actually work really well. No? So my next idea was to have the poster ripped already to reveal the chorus lyrics beneath:

I chose Helvetica to reflect the lyrics about "routine" and how "ambitions are low". Seemed apt. Here's another version where the flap hangs down, giving the poster a 3D quality:

I then switched my attention to another song, Rip It Up by Orange Juice:

Nuff said about that one. I just needed to get the idea out of my head and into reality so I could move on to the next thing - A-Bomb in Wardour Street by The Jam:

Hmm. Didn't really see where I could take that one. How about some Radiohead?

There is something I like about all the overlapping 2s and 5s. Apart from that it's a bit shit. Then I came up with an obvious one for my favourite Radiohead song How To Disappear Completely:

And then I decided to pick one song and bloody well stick to it for more than one or two ideas. But that's for the next post...

Abstract Development

As part of my Hidden project, I wandered around the house taking extreme close-up photos of stuff. I didn't want them to be recognisable, I just wanted to see if I could get some interesting shapes and colours. Some of them were pretty good and I felt that they would work with an extra layer of something - vector art or perhaps typography, maybe both.

I haven't played around with them much yet but I may revisit them at some future date. It's kind of useful to build up a library of these colours and textures as they may be of some use on another project.