Flyers and posters for third Pipedown night. This one done in collaboration with Matt Flynn who also runs Pipedown with me, key was making sure the theme continued from the previous flyers. The night itself is going to be ridiculous – Addison Groove, James Blake, Airhead, Xxxy are playing alongside ourselves and it’s free all night long. Details.

Anyway flyers after the jump or on Flickr.

Flyer design for next It’s All About event. Daemonds gave me free reign on this one (only had to incorporate his logo) which was real nice. It’s also a line-up of the sickest DJs so get yourself down on July 23rd.

Flyers after the jump.

Latest Night Slugs EP is Lil Silva’s Night Skanker, it’s out tomorrow, as usual I’ve done some work on possible concepts for the cover.

I’m having difficulties with ownership of work and people repeatedly saying it’s your ability to imagine an idea and not the technical skills to realise that idea that’s important. Ok, idea is key but when you hire photographer, illustrator, coder etc. to carry out said idea can you really claim ownership of the final product? In the art exhibition the artists work is always bigger than the curators but in graphic design it seems fame is reversed; designer plays role of curator, employs the artists and basks in the limelight. This seems to be pretty much most of the game at the moment. So much has to be said for development of an idea through process, ranging from mistakes made, a designers unique style and to pushing the boundaries of what a technology can actually do. I’m very much in the thought sphere that knowledge of technical process can only aid the creative outcome and not restrict it. With all that in mind I’m not sure how much ownership I can really take for these, at the end of the day it’s Alex’s vision that brings them to life. It’s also very much his direction and choice at the end of the day, hopefully my thoughts offer him something to spark off.

Anyway, key theme here was ENERGY which resulted in looking at the structure of dams. My ideas part i / part ii.

Cover after the jump.

My brother raps / MCs / writes and performs poetry under the name Dubb. He had his debut album R.A.P. (Rhythm And Poetry) out sometime last year and after an initial push on digital sales, he’s just had a load of physical CDs pressed up. The album is (completely unbiased here) really, really good, he performs his unique style of lyric-concious rap meets poetry over beats solely created from the mouth of beatbox pioneer TYTE – in action here. You should buy it from here or on iTunes.

Anyway, I’ve done all the design for the whole thing, the identity extends to spaces like Bandcamp and Myspace. But most exciting is the physical CD which I only picked up last night; you can see it here. Words are at the centre of the album – he takes a light approach to language playing with words and their various meanings; the cover hopefully reflects that.

Photos after the jump or bigger on Flickr.

More Night Slugs action; again coming up with concepts that Alex then turns into a cover. I’m really liking this way of working, it’s almost as if he does most of the hard work making the idea a reality…

This is Girl Unit’s EP I.R.L. – chat room abbreviation for “in real life” (tune of the year so far, check it). This started off with islands, and taking in detroit architecture and freeways we ended up on spaceships. All isolated imagery that fits with both the timbre of the soundtrack and the title too. An image I sourced from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oddessy clearly sparked something; of course, rendered in that Tron-like style that Alex has created.

My ideas part i / part ii.

Cover after the jump.

Flyers for the second Pipedown night. This one we had otherworldly beats from the label Keysound; heads Dusk & Blackdown brought LHF and Kowton. Absolutely next.

Design-wise, I want the flyers and posters to develop with each night into some sort of visual narrative. If the first flyer established the map, this one brings the map to life in three dimensions.

Flyers on Flickr or after the jump.

More Night Slugs work here.

Following the Mosca cover, Alex asked me to come up with a similar set of ideas for the second EP cover that he’d then develop and illustrate himself. The EP is The Only Way Is Up by Egyptrixx – twisted and epic house music, grab it here. The name changed halfway through so there’s two sets of ideas, the second more developed. It seems obvious but he settled on an Egyptian pyramid due to obvious ties to the name and also as a continuation of the epic, ancient structure explored in NS001.

My ideas – part i / part ii.

Finished cover and sketch after the jump.

I’ve just designed some covers for a guy called Chris Read’s new EP, Battlescars, it’s a bit different to the beats and bass driven stuff that you’d expect from me but cool nonetheless. It was a really good brief actually, wanting to distance himself from existing male singer-songwriters as much as possible, so I instantly wanted to move away from using photography of him (examples > 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 etc.). The other thing that I picked up on was he said he liked the way 70s album covers looked so using those colour palettes, their heavy use of geometric shapes and grainyness I’ve created this series of patterns. The grainyness is very false at the moment, this can be developed later, these are early designs…

Photos after the jump or bigger on Flickr.

So the first Night Slugs release is in a few weeks. It’s actually one of the best pieces of music I’ve heard in a while so I’m really glad to be the labels intern, they definately going good places. Ages ago I came up with some type designs and concepts for the cover that Alex could then work from. He used one of my ideas that I came up with, cannot wait for it to be printed…

See the whole 12″ after the jump.