Sleevelessness – a blog about graphic design, the web and digital music

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2009-02-06T16:56:00.003Z

It's been brought to my attention that some people aren't seeing new items in the Sleevelessness feed. If you haven't seen anything new for a while, please re-subscribe to the Feedburner URL. Sorry for any incovenience.

Goodbye Blogger, Hello Tumblr (Sleevelessness is moving)

2009-01-27T10:30:00.004Z

A few months ago I started a Sleevelessness Tumblog which was intended to work as a scrapbook for things I might feature here, and a place to post items I considered “off topic” for this blog. Unfortunately for Blogger, Tumblr makes it much easier to quickly post content such as photos, video and music. It also automatically creates curly quotes and em dashes, saving the typographic obsessive in me from having to type all the entity codes manually in Blogger.

All this has meant that I’ve gradually moved from posting lots here, to posting lots on Tumblr. So now the time has come to do two things:

1. Move Sleevelessness to Tumblr with immediate effect.

2. Widen the scope of the blog to include the little things outside the music and / or design space which Tumblr has made it so easy for me to post.

Those of you who have subscribed to the Sleevelessness feed need do nothing. The feed is powered by Feedburner, so I’ll simply swap the Blogger feed source for the Tumblr one. I'm also going to redirect the www.sleevelessness.com domain to the tumblog. The Blogger blog will remain available as an archive at sleevelessness.blogspot.com. I may at some point get around to working out how to import these posts into Tumblr.

I'd like to thank all my readers for your continuing support. Please to get in touch if you notice any problems with the switch over.

Magic marker makes magic music vid

2008-12-11T11:44:00.004Z

A magic marker, a camera and some snappy editing combine to brilliant effect in this clever promo for Field Music‘s “In Context” directed by Dan Lowe. This is a great example of how pure creativity can cut through the bullshit and achieve over two million YouTube views.

Picked up at the always excellent Make: Blog...

MGMT “The Youth” directed by Eric Wareheim

2008-11-06T10:36:00.002Z

There’s a lot of talk in the music video world at the minute about how low budgets are making it difficult to produce innovative promos. I can’t imagine this piece of madness for MGMT's “The Youth” cost much to make, and it certainly helps them stand out from their contemporaries.

AC/DC’s ‘Rock N Roll Train’ – the world’s first music video in Excel format

2008-10-23T19:00:00.008+01:00

We just finished this rather unorthodox project to promote “Black Ice”, the latest album from giants of rock AC/DC. The idea came about because we realised that many people work in offices where there’s a fairly heavy internet usage restrictions in place, and we loved the thought that we could subvert those policies with AC/DC’s music.

We decided to use the Excel format as it’s almost universally allowed through corporate firewalls. The result is the world’s first (and probably only ever) music video in Excel format, which plays back as ASCII art directly in the fields of the spreadsheet. You can download the spreadsheet here and try it out yourself.

Make a poster from your Last.fm history with LastGraph

2008-10-14T14:02:00.004+01:00

Andrew Godwin’s LastGraph is a clever tool which allows you to produce information graphics from your last.fm data.

The service’s coolest feature allows you to create a PDF (or SVG) poster of your listening history between two dates. Here’s mine from August 08 to today:

See a larger version

The fancy visualisation technique for the posters originally came from Lee Byron’s “What have I been listening to?” project.

The site also offers some premium features which allow you to hotlink graphs for inclusion in your own website (as well as helping out the project) for only £5 (or $10) a year.

The iPhone Blooms with Eno’s generative music

2008-10-11T09:13:00.004+01:00

Upon checking out the app store this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ “Bloom” for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Simple and beautifully executed, the application allows you to create your own ambient music via a simple and intuitive touch interface. You can also run the app in “listen” mode and watch it generate the soundscape for you. Perfect for falling asleep to.

This app succeeds in three ways – simplicity, immediacy and beauty. You don’t have to know anything about music to achieve instantly great results. Your gran could understand the interface intuitively, and because it’s Brian Eno the music is beautiful and the aesthetic minimal. Ten out of ten.

Tumbltape turns a Tumblelog into a mixtape

2008-10-09T22:28:00.002+01:00

Tumbltape is a brilliantly simple service which takes a Tumblelog and turns it into a playlist. For those of you wondering what the hell a Tumblelog is, it’s a type of blog which consists of short messages, pictures, music and video rather than the lengthier posts found on your traditional blog.

The combination works particularly well with my friend Laura KP’s blog, as she posts a lot of music. Check out the result here. I love it when things like this just work as if by magic.

Music is Math

2008-10-08T10:08:00.002+01:00

This music video by fellow Irishman Glenn Marshall is generated entirely from code using the marvelous Processing language developed at MIT specifically for use in programmatic art. The video looks amazing, although I am very slightly disturbed by the small swimming objects in evidence throughout the piece...

Throwing up glitter

2008-09-29T12:36:00.002+01:00

Great cover for Santogold by Isabelle Lumpkin. I can’t find any info about Isabelle online – if anyone knows who she is please let me know in the comments as I'd be interested in checking out some more of her work.

Andrio Abero

2008-09-23T10:30:00.002+01:00

Great poster for Thievery Corporation by Andrio Abero.

Sit on your favourite tune

2008-09-17T10:46:00.004+01:00

Matther Plummer–Fernandez’s Sound/Chair began life as a sound, before being plotted on a three dimensional graph. The resulting shape was then crafted into a chair made from water–jet cut polyethylene. The result is a truly unique piece of furniture which any music lover must surely covet.

It’s on sale for the bargain price of £3950 at Designersblock’s temporary shop in Selfridges London for the duration of the London Design Festival.

You’ll need to get to the shop quickly, however, as I’m heading down there in my cat burglar outfit (complete with suction cups and grappling hooks) tonight to steal it.

Via DJ Chroma’s Tumblr.

More cowbell!

2008-09-11T10:50:00.005+01:00

It's been a little while since a music related online service has come along which has made me drop everything and rush to try it out and find out more. MoreCowbell.dj is that thing. The service is a spin off of US tv show Saturday Night Live, where a special show featured Will Ferrell as Gene Frenkle, the cowbell player, and Christopher Walken as the music producer, Bruce Dickenson. It's simple but sure-to-be-massive mechanic allows users to add a variable amount of cowbell (and optional Walken) to any track they upload. They can then embed the newly modified track as a widget in their blog, social network profile etc. Here's one I made earlier:

The really exciting thing about MoreCowbell.dj is not the service itself, but the set of APIs that it's been built on. The Echonest provide a range of APIs which enable developers to build their own digital music applications without the need for expensive servers loaded with clever custom music software. Developers can use the service to analyse tracks and return important information like beats per minute and time signature which will undoubtedly lead to a whole raft of new browser based music apps.

The laptop is a real instrument – official

2008-09-08T21:06:00.003+01:00

DJ Chroma posted this article by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker about live bands using laptops on stage, which made me think.

When I’m not colouring in or sticking bits of the internet together with gaffer tape, I also like DJing. I remember the day I finally got my own Technics 1200s and a bad-ass Ecler scratch mixer. I practised very hard at first, then gradually a bit less hard. Then one day I realised that I had no new records because I had become so busy doing grown–up daytime stuff that I had no time to go to tiny crowded record shops and stand in line to use one of three available turntables to skip through the noisy bits of a bunch of 12s I often knew nothing about.

So I started using a laptop. I gave up scratching, juggling and the like (which I was only OK at after years of practice) and concentrated on playing music that people actually liked to dance to. I found that most of the labels I like sell downloads directly from their sites, and this meant that the night before I had to go out and play I could spend a couple of hours panic buying tunes from the comfort of my sofa.

Now I’m DJing more than ever (which was never very much to be fair) and people are actually dancing. My mixes aren’t always perfect, but no-one seems to care except me. And it’s all thanks to the laptop. My 1200s still look cool in my flat and occasionally I fire them up, but mostly they’re just really expensive conversation pieces. Come to think of it that 12" laptop is still pretty bulky. Can I justify spending £400 on a Tonium Pacemaker?

The Phonogra–phantasmascope (or how to animate with a Technics turnable)

2008-09-08T19:56:00.004+01:00

I’ve been staring at my 1200s for years and never thought of doing this. Bah! Found at the always excellent Monster Munch

It’s the end of The End

2008-09-02T17:33:00.008+01:00

I just found out from my friend Richard Hewitt than London’s legendary venue The End is due to close it’s doors in January after 13 years of top-notch dance floor action.

I've got a personal attachment to the club as I've spent many late nights over the last five years making interactive flyers for my long standing client Sancho Panza’s regular night at the venue’s AKA bar. I’ve also spent many late nights / early mornings in the club itself.

Looking back over the flyers in a misty-eyed sort of way, my favourites are:

The big long street that took a whole year to make

The one with the lighter

The one with the stop motion electronic man

The one which loads random 70s photos from Flickr that I made while on my holidays in Bermuda

The one where the users helped to brighten up London

The one where you could play along with the music on a drum

I'll miss The End & AKA dearly but it’s not the last of my work for Sancho Panza. We’re currently working hard on a brand new website which will be launching later this year.

Should we be treating digital music like radio, not records?

2008-09-02T17:02:00.005+01:00

For the first half of the twentieth century, commercial radio in the US was essentially illegal, and stations were subjected to the same kind of copyright lawsuits that P2P users are experiencing today. It was only after songwriters banded together to form The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) that radio stations went legit. In return for a fee the radio stations gained the right to play whatever music they liked.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an idea called Voluntary Collective Licensing which would apply a similar logic to digital music. The idea is that the music industry forms several “collecting societies” which offer file-sharing music fans the opportunity to “get legit” in exchange for a reasonable regular payment (something like $5 - $10 a month). The money collected would be divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music.

I think this is a good idea. It differs from a subscription model in that it allows users to choose the service that they want to use, and it also allows for user generated music libraries such as the ill-fated Oink to operate legally. The license fee could easily be rolled into consumer products such as broadband internet or mobile data packages (unlimited digital music sharing for an extra £5 a month!), and P2P users already do a much better job of publishing, cataloguing and documenting music than the music industry themselves.

You can read the full article over at Electronic Frontier Foundation where they have neatly set out their case and attempted to provide answers to many of the inevitable questions that arise.

“Okay, I get it. You’re creative. Awesome.”

2008-08-04T16:07:00.004+01:00

“But you’re totally wasting my morning as I helplessly wait for your designer’s dancing sausages to finish loading.”

Excellent post on 43folders.com entitled “Five Mistakes Band & Label sites make”.

On a side note, apologies for the lack of posting action on Sleevelessness in the last couple of weeks. I'm going through what is undoubtedly the busiest period of my career to date. Normal service will resume in September once I get back from my well deserved holiday. In the meantime I'll try to post the occasional thing to keep all you fabulous people interested.

The world is flat...

2008-07-16T10:31:00.004+01:00

...in this retro-eighties-high-tech-but-somehow-still-charming poster for Jose Gonzales by Nate Duval. The US gig posters scene just keeps giving and giving – if only promoters in the UK cared about design in this way.

You can buy it for the giveaway price of $25 in Nate’s shop where he’s also got tons of other great posters and art prints for sale.

Cable reunion poster by Aaron Horkey

2008-07-16T10:04:00.004+01:00

Aaron Horkey of Burlesque Design, Minnesota has created this amazingly detailed poster for American hardcore punk band Cable’s reunion tour. It also has the distinction of being the longest image I’ve ever posted. Spotted at OMG Posters.

LP Cover Lovers unearth car boot sale treasures

2008-07-09T08:30:00.003+01:00

Matt and Tony are two guys based in New York who've spent the last 30 years collecting vinyl LPs and 45s with funny, quirky and unusual covers. Now they've decided to share their collection with the world at the LP Cover Lover blog.

Here are just some of the many gems they’ve revealed so far:

Soul Snaps drum breaks have been sampled by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and The Prodigy.

Health and safety was a big thing in the fifties

It meant something different in those days apparently...

The world’s first album cover

2008-07-09T08:03:00.003+01:00

This, apparently is the world’s first album cover, designed for Columbia by then 23 year old designer Alex Steinweiss. Before this records were sold in generic sleeves. You can read the full story and see lots more images over at Udependent.

Setting stuff on fire is cool – official (an interview with Andrew Strasser)

2008-06-27T09:46:00.016+01:00

Earlier this month many of the music blogs were talking about how mashup master Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) planned to release his latest album “Feed The Animals” in a Radiohead “pay what you like” style. I checked out the website and immediately thought, “feck the business model – this record’s got a great sleeve!”. I emailed GT’s record label Illegal Art to find out who was responsible, and they kindly put me in touch with Brooklyn, NY based designer Andrew Strasser who agreed to conduct a swift email interview for Sleevelessness.

Slv Great sleeve for Girl Talk’s “Feed The Animals”. What’s the story behind the cover?

A.S. Behind every cover there is a story, haha... There are two parts to Feed The Animals – the title, and the image that we ended up with. I do stage visuals when Girl Talk goes on large tours or plays at big festivals, and all of the equipment was seriously just getting eaten up by all of the comotion on stage. We had large inflatable palm trees and halloween spider archways, all from very suburban on-line inflatable stores. As soon as the inflatables would go up, the chanting impatient crowd would just get a hold of it somehow, and we’d just watch a palm tree get sucked right into the organic mass of Girl Talk fans... never to be seen again. When you go on a 30 day tour, and watch this happen every day, you start feeling like you are going on some kind of an expedition to feed the hungriest of animals (we’re animals too for going along with it).

The cover itself does not relate to “Feed the Animals”. I was doing visuals with Gregg in Las Vegas when he opened for Gnarls Barkley, Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, and others for this very exciting and very strange Chinese New Year celebration. The crowd was SEATED, and was mostly a hip hop crowd, very mainstream. There was an MC and of course, he’s going to pick on the sorest thumb of the show, which would be Girl Talk... He kicks it off with “so why are you called Girl Talk anyway, what kind of a name is that?”... I think that he was kind of scarred from having to answer that question in front of so many skeptics. The solution was to do a subtle name change from Girl Talk to GT - not an official name change, just a nickname. Gregg originally wanted the GT flames on a brick wall, but I suggested a more ET/Home Alone kind of image, something that references the suburbs more.

Slv Where is the house? Did you take the photo yourself?

A.S. I was in Virginia Beach visiting my family, and I grabbed my moms 6 megapixel snapshot camera and did some long exposures on the house across the street when they had only one light on, and that became the house. Somehow the shot came out perfect.

Slv Did you really set the grass on fire?

A.S. We were really aiming to set a big lawn on fire and actually do it, but the logistics were absolutely bo-bo, so we didn’t do that. I did a micro scale version of the GT on fire with some twigs and lighter fluid, with help from my lovely sister Dana, and our great friend Lisa Ramsey (who was originally going to be a silhouette in the lit window of the house). We preferred nobody in the shot eventually.

The twigs overlaid on the grass was a good first start, but it didn’t look LARGE it made the house look like a scaled down model. I then turned to fire rendering techniques from some really tacky and cheesy websites where they teach you Photoshop tricks, like how to write your name out in fire, or in gold. I took this knowledge and went really far with it - I embellished the flame with some real shots of fire from our barbecue grill from memorial day (my dad was squirting tons of lighter fluid into our backyard grill).

Slv When did you first realise you wanted to be a designer?

A.S. I don’t want to be a designer. I want to be a musician. I am working on my own album right now.

Slv How did you get your first break? (e.g. the first piece of design work that you actually gave a shit about)

A.S. I started in middle school, someone punched me in the stomach for wearing a Mossimo shirt in the halls and I was so infuriated that I couldn’t wear a shirt, that I started researching ringer t-shirts (very skater style at the time). I took a picture of the tide bottle with a 1 megapixel camera (that was a lot at the time) and went over the words TIDE in paintbrush to make it say ZINE. then i did the same with a Chinese takeout box.

I made about 30 shirts and sold them all to the hottest girls in my middle school through a top secret mole in my math class. He had the in.

Slv How did you first get involved with Greg Gillis (AKA Girl Talk)?

A.S. He used to see me around in the cafeteria in college and vice versa – he looked like Rivers Cuomo and I looked like some big fat nerd who tucked his shirt in and wore a tie every day (this has greatly changed, now both of us have beards and we wear ugly clothes all the time like a bunch of hippies).

We eventually hung out once with our friends Mike Ray (who is redoing the Illegal Art website and brand with me) and Alex Preston (who is now in the band Mittens on Strings and makes incredible hand made shirts). I remember that night begging for them not to shave a Ninja Turtle face in my hair (they gave me a haircut the first time i met them and we hung out).

Slv Where do you work and what are you working on this week?

A.S. I work at home, in front of Google Spreadsheets, managing my clients. This week I’m working on my album, and doing some promotional flyers and banners for a Big Gay Cruise in Fire Island – should be fun! I also attended an event on Monday night for my friend Jeremy Parker’s record release party (Tha Pumpsta), I wore my costume (Turns out Andrew is also a performance artist - check out Bad Brilliance for more info).

Slv What records are you listening to right now?

A.S. Lil Wayne + Feed The Animals is the heavy duo right now.

Slv You wake up in Brooklyn, you’ve had 1,000,000 beers last night and a magic badger offers you any item of food you like – what would it be?

A.S. Nachos with cheese, ground beef, strips of beef, burger meat, cow beefs, pork, pork beefs, raw chicken, dutch chicken, deep fried halved radishes soaked in duck fat, sour cream, guacamole, blue cheese dressing, crab meat lumps, cheddar cheese, nacho cheese and drizzled with lime and tequila and flame torched for like 3 seconds or so.

You can check out lots more of Andrew’s work at his website including some excelllent photography.

Strasser also did the above cover for White Williams’ “Smoke” – you can check out the intriguing story behind it at Paper Thin Walls.

Best use of flipbook, ever.

2008-06-25T12:36:00.002+01:00

Super video for “Squeeze Me” from the brilliantly named Dutch act Kraak & Smaak. Found at Swiss Miss.

Adrian Shaughnessy interviews Storm Thorgerson on Resonance FM today

2008-06-20T12:04:00.003+01:00

My good friend John Foley of bite! informs me that Adrian Shaughnessy is interviewing legendary graphic designer Storm Thorgerson on Resonance FM today. Storm is most famous for his album covers for Pink Floyd such as the iconic sleeve for Dark Side of the Moon (below). You can listen online at 4pm (GMT) today.