Since we're half way through and i still need to get out more...
What's the most surprising, unexpected, weird, or fun thing you've seen this year?
Could be a show, a street performer, or just a funny incident! let me hear it!
...over on rarewaves (not sponsored or anything, haha) - wild price!
https://www.rarewaves.com/products/5021732544568-the-magic-whip
they have the 2LP for 4 quid more too.
From the new book "Logo Rhythm – Band Logos That Rocked The World" - shared on Stylorouge's Facebook page.
Text reads:
>In 1990, Seymour had just become Blur. Recently signed to Food Records, they'd started playing the college circuit, supporting The Cramps no less, and needed T-shirts to sell.
Dave Balfe, boss man at Food (and former keyboard player for Teardrop Explodes), duly brought in design studio Stylorouge to rustle up some ideas. Including a logo that would look the part on merch and help spread the word.
It was your typical branding conundrum. Balfe and Blur didn't want to buy into the baggy-trousered indie rock dance crossover scene that was just starting to fade. Too obvious. Too northern. They needed something accessible. but still cool and original.
It took a long, long while, recalls Stylorouge founder and creative director Rob O'Connor. "Food were adamant that they didn't want Blur to be marketed like anyone else. They were demanding but they were right."
Things started to click when Stylorouge ventured beyond the visual tropes of pop music and into pop culture. There was a distinct 1960s tinge to early Blur songs like "She's So High" and "There's No Other Way". They were knowing, cheeky London art school types, fun and mischievous.
So the designers took inspiration from Pop Art, recontextualising paintings, curious retro photography and everyday artefacts to create an unexpected, engagingly off-kilter design language. This post-modern visual aesthetic was to become vividly apparent in later sleeve designs, but it also influenced the logo.
There were a couple of subconscious typographic reference points, channelled from the world of consumer goods rather than music. One was the logo of Brother, the Japanese office printer manufacturer. The other was the original packaging for Bounce tumble dryer sheets. Apart from beginning with b, both these brand name/logos were resolutely lowercase, with rounded, chunky, tightly kerned letters that seemed almost to flow into each other.
Based on a pencil sketch by O'Connor, the logo was hand drawn and artworked from scratch by designer Tim Harrison, using Indian ink and Rubylith film, rather than adapted from an existing typeface. "Drawing the logo ourselves meant we could easily adapt and modify it explains O'Connor. "We could pop it in the right-hand corner, extend the b, the and the r. bleed it off the cover, for example. We did loads of variations of it along the way." And, of course, it didn't hurt that the band name was so short and punchy. "That was the way at the time," says O'Connor. "One-syllable names like Blur, Pulp, Cud, Ride."
"Gone were the days of New Riders of the Purple Sage and Jefferson Airplane. It was all about miniaturisation - there were mini CDs and MiniDiscs. If you wanted to make an impact you didn't choose a bloody long name."
For O'Connor, the reason the Blur logo has stood the test of time, is not so much about the design as the brilliant music it represented. "People put lots of kudos on something because of its association. It's not about packaging or identity, they're just a great band. There are so many other examples where that's the case. The logo was dated to start with because it had that retro Sixties vibe to it, so it's probably never going to date anymore?"
Came on screen briefly during an interruption to the signal during Haiti vs Scotland