Judging books by their covers
Let’s discuss the design choices behind Dive.
Since I last posted an update, a lot has happened on my music mag project. Most of the editorial is finished and although I’ve been juggling this with my dissertation, Counterpoint and my day job, I’m about halfway done with laying out the pages. I’ve even got a collaboration in the pipeline which should make for a great launch.
Because I might not be posting another update before I send it to print, I thought I’d write about the influences behind the magazine’s design and some of the thoughts I was having before making key decisions.
Right from the start, when I decided that Dive should come in the same format as a vinyl, I wanted the cover to take the best parts of record covers and magazine covers. If you’ve ever played the Wikipedia game where you build a record cover for an indie band by repeatedly hitting ‘random article’ then you’ll know how easy it is to mock up a reasonable pastiche of album artwork. So, as I’ve been working on Dive, I’ve kept in mind the fact that I needed to find a balance between the readability of magazine design with the artistry of album artwork.
My first port of call was to start pulling records off my shelves and look for aspects of their design I liked.
Given that Dive is going to be about as large as a single, I started with some of the EPs I had lying around. I pulled these out because they seemed so visually arresting; the anarchic yellow of Banana Splits; the gooey illustration of Magic Potion’s release for Flying Vinyl; and the details of Bruegel’s paintings on Fleet Foxes releases from around the time of their debut LP; each seem so evocative of the band they’re representing. The Belle & Sebastian cover in the top left was the one that caught my eye — not only because those covers have become quietly iconic over the years — but because it used monochrome photography.
I’ve made my peace with the fact that you can only effectively risograph photos in one colour, and the Blues Are Still Blue cover gave me a few ideas about how doing that without just using black-and-white.
Meanwhile, the converse side of this Talking Heads Stop Making Sense live recording — which has so little crowd noise that they may as well have not bothered, frankly — has some nice typography, even if putting rhetorical questions on the back of your album is a bit self-indulgent.
If anything, the sleeve that ended up informing the cover the most was this gem, a compilation of Smokey Robinson’s greatest hits as a songwriter. Again, I love the colour wash on the photograph, and the design of the title — very similar to a magazine masthead — was quite a heavy influence.
Meanwhile, I kept dipping in and out of the book Total Records: Photography and the Art of the Album Cover. There’s tonnes of gorgeous record covers in there, but the ones that stood out for me were the covers from Blue Note jazz records. I’m not much of a jazz fan, and only vaguely aware of the label itself, but boy those covers are cool.
Like the Belle & Sebastian covers, they’ve used a colour wash to add an air of surrealism to the photos. The images themselves are striking and even now, with jazz itself something of a nostalgic genre, seem modern and avant garde. In particular, Into Somethin! looks like a great one for printing, with that masthead element at the top and slightly off kilter type on the title slipping over the image.
Other examples that stood out from Total Records were the covers of blues artists released on Prestige/Bluesville in the early sixties, gorgeous colour-washed images of nomadic bluesmen with names like Blind Gary Davis, Shakey Jake and Sunnyland Slim. With these inspirations in mind, I was surfing around the Fonts In Use site for typographic inspiration and came across this cover from St Etienne’s 1993 album So Tough.
Although the other side of the sleeve looks very 1990s, the front is quite timeless. There’s no real indication from the design of the kind of music the band make, the subject of the album, or even what subculture they belong to. That might not make it a great record cover, but I found myself plundering it for the cover of Dive. In particular, I loved the type used — according to Font In Use the titles are in Titanic, a typeface that dates back to 1905. With the site’s help, I managed to find a digitised version for free.
Returning to Blue Note with this cover for The Blues, I ended up going down rabbit-hole trying to find a free version of Vogue, a competitor face to Futura made in the 30s. There was something very appealing about using typefaces and fonts that references these iconic sleeves, but which also worked so well for writing — just look at how easy Vogue is to read as a body text for this sleeve!
I’m still not decided on whether to use the free approximation of Vogue I found or whether to just use Futura. Although I briefly toyed with the idea of shelling out for James Montalbano’s VF Sans (once used by Vanity Fair), I shied away from spending $450 dollars on a typeface. Since Dive is about a place, rather than a specific genre or subculture, it felt important to aim for something that reminded readers of record shops, if not a specific record or label. I found that I absolutely loved the designs that these inspirations led to, and I’m quite excited to see how they come out of the riso.
So that’s where I’m at. The next steps for Dive are to finish off the last editorial pieces and spend a couple of days getting the layouts done. You’ll hear from me when I’m ready to print.
