Page: my-work
Entries: 1
Acoustic design
I’ve wanted to share a couple projects from the end of last year that haven’t really found a home in my archive. Well, I took down my portfolio website so maybe I mean I’m trying to establish a new kind of documentation for my work. I like explaining the steps I took to make something as a reminder to myself that there was something worth doing in the process even if the final object is just a jpeg. I use drawing more and more in my design. I like the way I can apply typographic rules to something that doesn't really fit into that system of thought. In the case of the following two projects, its feels like I turned a corner and am ready to let go of an old method so I wanted to make a note of where it happened.
1. Smack Mellon, Winter Party invitation
I was hired to make a benefit invitation for a non-profit art space. There wasn’t a lot to go on conceptually, but the party did coincide with the opening of a new exhibition so I did a bit of research on the artist to see what I could pull together.
Images I saved from Carmen Amengual’s instagram page.
For whatever reason (Luddism) I am increasingly turned off by completely digital work. I like the idea of the presence of the hand where it doesn’t quite fit. For a long time now I’ve worked with Illustrator’s image trace tool, vectorizing scanned drawings to produce something that is neither hand nor not-hand. So I set to work drawing a page of circles in pencil that very vaguely referenced a photo of a cement architectural motif.
This took me much longer than I care to admit.
I ran through what I usually do. Scan the drawing, create a high contrast black and white edit, and apply my image trace presets.
Left: grayscale jpeg, right: vector result.
I used a portion of the vector results as a structural blueprint for the typographic layer. Some things align perfectly and some don’t. I would say it’s more of a spiritual logic than one that’s absolute.
The final invitation.
In the end this was a quick one-off that went into an email. Not very important to me or to the people who received it. I guess that’s why I feel the urge to commemorate it here.
2. Wilks Group, A Flat Suite album art
My friend Zack asked if I wanted to work on the album art for their upcoming album and I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a music release before so I was excited for the opportunity. The songs are mostly acoustic arrangements and so it made sense to me to make this another drawing project. Drawing is acoustic design?
My first attempt to scan the “A Flat Suite” drawing captured the Smack Mellon invitation sketch underneath. Funny.
I had this idea to depict flatness in the text. I wasn’t sure how I would render it in the final version, but I started with this drawing of the letters in one-point perspective, thinking that the “shadow” of the reversed letters would spell the title in the correct orientation. From there, honestly I got stuck so I made a page of nothing doodles a few weeks later to clear the cobwebs.
I had just gotten a stencil in the mail for entirely different reasons.
My next step would normally be to image trace and start playing around with all the parts, but this time it felt wrong - or at least boring. Especially so soon after finishing a project using the same process. It dawned on me that I could work with the raw drawings as primary elements. Something I had weirdly never considered before.
Struggling with including digital type.
In my sketches, I was getting sick of digital type feeling like an isolated layer on top of a drawn background. No combination felt incorporated or of the same world. Album art is forgiving in that it doesn’t need to have legible text, or any text at all. Collage felt like a refreshing way to think about things. I came up with new rules about how images could have baselines and align to the grid. I did my best to arrange the drawings as if they were letters.
The final album art. Type it with pencil.
I’m happy to have unstuck myself in this way. I can’t promise that I’ll never use image trace again. The lesson here for me is less about vector vs. raw and more about creating a cohesive visual language that better integrates the hand with the not-hand. At the very least it feels nice to have done something differently.