Creative Fetish: Guitar Pedals

By Noah Atkinson & Jonny Hawton

Noah, resident design expert, and Jonny, guitar pedal horder, dive into an aural exploration of guitar pedal design.

Isn’t it curious that visual design is often the initial entry point into an aural experience? Be it an album cover, rave poster or guitar pedal; if we’re going into something blind, it’s often the visual element that sparks curiosity.

I love this idea that we rely on one sense to communicate another; using our eyes to interpret what our ears will hear. Communicating something invisible yet so evocative is a perfect demonstration of the power of design. And it’s probably something humanity has tried to capture for as long as we’ve been creating images, in the sand or on a cave wall.

We dug into this idea by exploring the power of a guitar pedal’s visual design in communicating the beautiful, weird and wild sounds within. From the humble chorus to the funk-filled envelope filter, we reveal what the pedal design said about its sound.

Let’s jump in.

The “Bonetender” font was all that was needed to place a certain sound on this pedal. It is or is very similar to a typeface called Village & Orbit. This font and others like it were inspired by the Psychedelia music and art posters by San Francisco artists Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso.

This design actually gives away some of the sound it can create with the various text descriptors on the pedal. Words like “lofi”, “delay” and “looper” help the user get a general sense of what the pedal can do but it is still difficult to guess the tonal qualities.

I expected this pedal to have a much more abrasive tone than it actually did. What was actually played was a much more soothing sound compared to the clashing color combinations and typefaces found on the pedal design. The echoing line pattern was a good visual indicator of the pedals reverb/echoing capabilities.

To a non-designer, this pedal design would come across as a fairly simple and utilitarian design. Under a closer inspection, you can see that the typeface used is Brush Script Italic which is fairly similar to the Fender logo. Based on this, I guessed that the sound would have a classic big guitar sound.

The Micro-Tron III is one of my favorite pedal designs. Every element reminds me of retro futurism, especially the use of Eurostile. While I was expecting something a bit more robotic, I think the pedal design does a decent job of visually capturing the sound.

Small Stone seems like it was influenced by the graphic design of its era rather than the sound that it creates. The sound has a very lush and wavy tone, while the graphics have a futuristic and industrial look.

As designers, it is our job to convey a narrative to the viewer and this is usually done with a combination of typography, images, textures, patterns and/or colors. All of these tools have a wealth of history attached to them, which helps us articulate the story. For example, a serif typeface usually invokes a sense of classicism, while sans serif is associated with modernism. The same is true for sound, different guitar tones are associated with different genres and even different memories.

If a designer taps into the right narrative, it points the user’s imagination to the right sound memory. As we found, some pedals do this wonderfully. The “Bonetender” pedal, which produces the classic fuzz sound of the 1960s, relies on the history of the typeface and its association with the 1960s Psychedelia era to evoke the correct narrative. But not all pedals can be defined as easily. Some have intricate effect features that span the spectrum of sound, which makes the designer’s role difficult when limited to such a small space. And some designers just choose to do something completely off-piste, making a design statement broader than the sound of the pedal itself. Either way, you’ve got to admire the effort, artistry and creativity contained within the few small inches of pedal real-estate as well as the important role it plays in shaping our overall opinion of the pedal.

There’s no doubt that visual design and sound have a complex and fascinating relationship. The two are often explored in tandem but what is exciting is how one can capture the essence of the other. We look forward to testing this topic further.