Category: {design}

Design

New things for October

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Two new pieces of work appear this month. The cover for the Emissaries CD by Melechesh was something I did earlier this year but the album release was delayed. Melechesh are Sumerian Thrashing Black Metal maestros and their website is here.

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And finally this month, Jon Farmer’s book, Sieg Heil Iconographers, arrives from the printers. At 608 pages this is by far the largest book I’ve designed to date. Featuring illustrations and photos on nearly every page, it was a lot of work, so I’m very pleased that Anthony Rowe have done their customary excellent print job. The book is softcover and I was worried that the binding might be too tight to allow for easy reading but it falls open very easily. Savoy will have this on sale later this month, details at their site.

Penguin book covers

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Nice collection of old covers for Penguin Books on Joe Kral’s Flickr pages. Looking over these, many of which are very familiar even though I’ve never owned them, makes me aware of how many hours of my life must have been spent in secondhand bookshops. The David Pelham cover for A Clockwork Orange has always been a favourite Penguin design. Pelham did a number of great covers for Penguin’s SF titles in the 1970s but the Burgess volume proved the most durable, unusually for a cover design surviving many reprintings. Via Boing Boing.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

New things for September

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top: The Highbury Working, The Lucid View.
bottom: Manchester District Music Archive design, The Major Arcana.

As mentioned last month, I’ve updated and expanded all my CafePress shops which means you can now (should you wish) buy T-shirts, posters, mousepads and other goods from selected artwork. Look for links on the relevant artwork pages. In addition, I’ve added four new shops featuring the pieces shown above; some of the Major Arcana designs are also available individually.

Lastly, CafePress have expanded their range of calendars to include vertical format which means I’ve been able to make three different calendars this year. Calendars proved popular when I did one a couple of years ago but the horizontal format wasn’t very amenable to most of my artwork.

There’ll be more CafePress updates later this month, if time allows.

The Major Arcana

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Tarot designs proliferate at a seemingly unstoppable pace (you can see a selection of them here) so it’s probably fair to say that the world doesn’t need more of them. However, most modern designs are pastiches or fantasy-oriented works that tend towards an elaboration even more baroque than some of the older designs. My As Above, So Below poster was an earlier attempt at presenting traditional occult schematics in a modern setting. The challenge with this Tarot design was to try and create a Major Arcana set using nothing but international symbol pictograms or dingbat sets. It succeeds for the most part although I had to cheat a couple of times (creating a light bulb from scratch, for instance) and it’s debatable how recognisable these cards would be without their labels. I was following the Aleister Crowley scheme that renames a few of the cards, and some of his designs, especially The Aeon which replaces The Last Judgment, are rather resistant to simplification.

I would have uploaded this to a new CafePress shop as a poster design but their servers don’t seem to like my big jpegs just now. Maybe later.

Update: It finally uploaded. This is the shop.