Nice website for Seattle band Death Cab For Cutie who also have the best band name, ever. A nice balance of Flash, typography, good design and layout, minus 10 points for the silly splash page. We did the 90s already remember? Site by Mathematics.

Here’s this month’s e-flyer for my long-standing client Sancho Panza’s monthly night at The End & AKA club in London. Users can add a splash of colour to the city via some rather exotic feathered fauna.

Tonight’s random surfing turned up this excellent poster for Philadelphia based band Audible by Philadelphia based illustrator extraordinaire Tim Gough. You can see lots more of his posters at GigPosters.com.



Tim also produces Cut and Paste, a beautiful hand-crafted zine he describes as “a collection of abandoned ideas, random doodles, and half finished leftovers” – you can order a copy from his shop.

My copy of Band ID arrived during the week and today I finally had a chance to take some pics of the book. First impressions are that it's good quality – it's reassuringly weighty and the hard cover is sturdy and nicely textured. The pick image on the front is slightly raised and plasticated which is a nice touch, although ironically the logo for the book itself is a bit half-assed. The internal spreads are well laid out with plenty of white space and well set type.




The logos are divided up into different genres of music (the extra-heavy section is a particularly good laugh) and the stories behind several of the more iconic logos are well told, including interviews with the designers and musicians involved. I particularly enjoyed reading the back-story to the creation of the Rolling Stones iconic “tongue” logo, contributed by the marque’s designer John Pasche. The book is mostly devoted to the logos themselves, but where there is writing it’s insightful and entertaining.

Rather than bore you all to tears with an in-depth review, I've decided instead to list my ten favourite logos from the book. I've chosen the logos I think represent good examples of logo design rather than those representing bands whose music I like, or about whom I feel a misty-eyed nostalgia. This means I consider them well drawn or typeset, memorable and having stood the test of time.

1. Rolling Stones “Tongue”

Designed by John Pasche in 1970, the tongue has become one of the most recognisable symbols in the world. At heart it's simple, memorable and nicely drawn.

2. Slayer

Steve Craig’s spiky yet minimal lettering is in my opinion the best of the heavy-metal marques. It was created in 1983 and still looks fresh today.

3. AC/DC

Gerard Huerta’s 1983 logo for AC/DC has graced a million maths books, school bags and t-shirts across the globe. It's compact, direct and has loads of balls, just like the band it represents.

4. Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger’s 1973 marque for ELP is elegant, graceful and wouldn't look out of place in Bauhaus era Germany.

5. Metallica

Designed by band member James Hetfield in 1983, this one rivals AC/DC as the ultimate metal logo.

6. Kiss

Created by the band’s lead guitarist and former graphic designer Ace Frehley in 1973, the Kiss logo courted controversy on the German legs of their tours with it's SS inspired aesthetic. It's the perfect corporate logo for Gene Simmons' money-making rock machine.

7. Thin Lizzy

Jim Fitzpatrick’s chunky 1976 creation for Thin Lizzy is everything a no-nonsense rock band’s logo should be.

8. New York Dolls

The coolest of the bunch, the Dolls’ distinctive lipstick lettering was created in 1973, yet looks like it could have been made yesterday.

9. The Monkees

The Monkees weren’t even a proper band, but they definitely had a proper logo, a slice of beautifully crafted lettering designed by Nick LoBianco in 1966.

10. Run DMC

Bold and shouty, the chunky type and heavy horizontal rules of the Run DMC logo do justice to the hip-hop legends’ explosive sound.

Attempting to find links to information about the creators of these ten logos threw up a few interesting bits of trivia:

The ELP logo was designed not by a graphic designer, but by the Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger, who is also the creator of the Alien creature from Ridley Scott’s pant-soilingly scary sci-fi film of the same name.

The Monkees logo was designed by legend of lunch box (yes those things that kids take to school with flask, apple and very thin ham sandwich in) design Nick LoBianco.

The Thin Lizzy marque was created by Jim Fitzpatrick a fellow Irishman whose lengthy artistic career completely bamboozles me. How can the same man who created the image of Che Guevara which became an icon of popular culture, have gone on to create some of the most ghastly pseudo-celtic crap ever to blight the world of art. These days he seems to spend his time photographing beautiful women and his latest work can be found at his Flickr stream.

Band ID, The ultimate book of band logos by Bodhi Oser is available from the publishers, Chronicle Books for the entirely reasonable price of $40. I picked mine up from Amazon UK where it was a steal at £13. This is one coffee table book which your friends will actually pick up and read, so if you love music and you were the type of kid who drew band logos on their schoolbag, then grab yourself a copy without delay.

I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Portishead’s “Third”, an album which has been a long time coming.



The limited edition box set looks pretty sweet too. For £40.00 you get a usb stick shaped like the band's logo, a double vinyl album, an etched vinyl 12" of the frightening Machine Gun single and a limited edition print by Nick Uff.

The box set looks enticing but unfortunately there’s very little info on the band’s shop about what you get. I've no idea who Nick Uff is (turns out with a little research that he's an animator), and no info is given about the 5 “films” which come loaded on the USB drive.

The band have obviously put a lot of effort into the production of the box set, which looks beautiful, but at £40 a pop they need to try harder with their online shop.

If you can't wait three weeks to hear the album you can catch an exclusive preview on Current TV at 10pm GMT tomorrow evening. I’ll be tuning in for sure.

Great video for Goldfrapp’s “Happiness” by Colonel Blimp. I also urge you to read the copy on their biog page. Best analogy ever.

Video originally picked up at the CR Blog.

I'm not going to talk about this at length as Paul Glazowski has already done the job at Mashable, but I would like to express my concern at the recent trend in bands and artists creating their own social networks. The most high profile of these have been Radiohead's W.A.S.T.E. Central and 50 Cent’s thisis50.com.

I'm all in favour of bands creating and nurturing communities around their official sites – this has been happening for years with artist forums, and has grown to include commenting and user generated content such as photos and fan remixes.

It's possible that if OpenSocial takes off then this kind of fragmentation of the social web will be easier to manage – but until then it makes sense to engage with your fan base on the existing (and hugely popular) social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. We only just got everyone together in one place – why leave so soon?

French artist Gregory Chatonsky made this piece of audio art which generates sound via some sensors placed on a broken hard disk. The amount of vibration is picked up and changed into sound via a program running on a PC. Hit the play button below to listen – it sounds kind of beautiful but eerie and reminds me of the ambient music of German glitch pioneers Oval.



Original article at Make: Blog

An interesting twist on the usually oh-so-hip graphic design tome, Band ID looks at over 1,000 of what the authors consider to be the most powerful examples of band and artist logos. Unlike the likes of my Stefan Sagmeister book, there’s a small chance that if I put this on my coffee table my friends might actually pick it up. It’s not out till June but you can pre-order it from Amazon or the publisher Chronicle Books. I'm going to order it – stand by for a review soon.

The 80s–tastic “Video Killed The Radio Star” by Buggles.

Great motion graphics in this video for DVNO by french electro types Justice.

I was in the pub last night, when a heated discussion broke out. It centered around which, with hindsight, were your top 5 albums of the 90’s. The discussion ended with a challenge – to produce by 12am today, a definitive top 5. I've recently been fooling around with Mixwit, so I suggested that not only should each of us produce a list, but that we should also create a digital mixtape of 5 tracks, one from each of our chosen records.

So here's mine...

...and those top 5 albums in order are:

Portishead – Dummy
Autechre – Tri Repeatae
A Guy Called Gerald – Black Secret Technology
Squarepusher – Hard Normal Daddy
Weezer – Weezer

Mixwit is powered by Seeqpod, a music search and streaming service which indexes any mp3s it finds publicly available on the web. The Mixwit service itself is in the very early stages of beta, and while it's definitely a bit ropey, it's simple and fun. There's also the problem that none of the artists whose tracks are currently available on Seeqpod will ever see any money for their use. Assuming these legal issues get ironed out, however, I reckon the mixtape has a bright future online. It gets back to the heart of why people love music and why they want to share it with their friends.