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about this time a year ago i was back in england with my brother wandering around london buying gifts and the like. at some point somewhere between the various shops we’d been to, i ended up with a tabloid sized newspaper in my bag with an drawing of iron man on the front, bleeding from his eyes. just above his head in a circle read the words, your days are numbered.

sitting down to grab a bite somewhere in soho i pulled out the paper and spread it across the table in front of us. immediately i was taken aback by the design of the layouts on every page. it’s long been a great sadness of mine that so few seem to have learned from magazines like the ray gun and the face, that one should endeavour to design layouts in response to their content, rather than the other way around. of course to find that this?free publication was being braver than the majority of expensive mags weighing down the racks in shops worldwide, should of course have come as absolutely no surprise. free fanzines and their brethren have been developing their punk aesthetic this way for decades now, and this new beauty in front of me was clearly no different.

in their own words, your days are numbered?is an independent graphic fiction magazine documenting the world around creators, comics and pop-culture. a world that whilst i have a huge respect and appreciation for, am absolutely ready to admit i’m not involved in as much as i would like, or perhaps should be. this ostentatiously designed thing lying spread-eagle over my burger and fries however, was about to pull me in deeper into that world that i ever thought i’d go.

arriving back in new york i found the issue in my bags and immediately pinned it to my bedroom wall. if anything it was simply going to remind that there’s still hope. however, over the next few days i kept looking at it and eventually pulled it down from the wall, opened it up and flipped to the masthead. i was going to write to these guys. they had to know how brilliant i thought they were, and as is my curse, i was absolutely going to offer to work for them, at whatever cost. it’s one thing to think something’s great, another thing to encourage them to continue – but if you really believe that what they’re doing is great, you have to work to take them to another level in whatever capacity you can.

firing off an email into the void, it was quite a while before i got a response. eventually i got a very nice email from their editor steve turner who immediately pointed out the humour in the fact that i was an english guy in new york writing to an american in london, and pretty soon we were talking about all of that and more. they immediately asked if i was interested in doing a layout or two for the next issue. not just that, they were asking if i wanted to layout an interview with alex garland?about the script he’d just written for the new judge dredd feature film. as a fan of dredd from when i was kid, and a big critic of alex garland’s work, it was perhaps more than i could have ever hoped for. certainly as my first shot at designing a magazine layout of any sort.

they were very clear about the fact that i could absolutely do whatever i wanted, and simply sent me text and images to work with. i couldn’t really ask for more.

then another serendipitous thing happened. a parcel had arrived in our studio during the spring containing a big brick of a comic book with the title king city. i had no idea who had sent it and during some time off in los angeles this summer to edit a short film i’ve been working on, i started to read it. it was captivating to say the least. the artwork, whilst not typically my style, married so beautifully with the playful dialogue, characters and science fiction concepts, that i was a quick convert. in fact i had to take care to not read it too fast, as comic books in my experience are too easily ripped through and thrown in a pile never to be visited again, and i’d not enjoyed one this much in a while.

after emailing around, curious as to where the book had materialized from, i soon discovered an old friend and comic book enthusiast had simply thought i might enjoy it, so had fired it off at me from his amazon account.

well of course then i get an email from steve at YDAN saying that they had another layout they were interested in me doing, an interview with the creator of?king city – brandon graham. once again i’d been blessed with that sacred thing in design – a great love and understanding of the content i was being asked to lay out. furthermore after being put in touch with brandon so that i could get some of his artwork from him, he offered to do a custom drawing just for the interview. i was over the moon. i set to work immediately, once again on two double page spreads and whilst this was definitely a tougher layout this time, am happy with the results.

afterall you can only do so much before the words have to take precedent, but i felt the balance between what was readable and how much character i got to put into the layouts in order to make it a memorable and exciting reading experience, was good.

the brandon graham issue is now on the shelves and i’m told doing better than any issue they’ve had before, in their admittedly short life thus far. you can find it in london at rough trade, brick lane coffee, eggs milk butter and gosh comics. i’m told it’s gonna be winging it’s way into various comic book stores in new york in the not too distant future too. so you know, if you have the means, it is?free afterall. whether you’re a comic book fan or not, steve and his team are doing the most fucking fantastic job of covering all sorts of relevant content.?most importantly of all however, they are trying to make every issue powerfully different, entertaining just to flip through and fully immersive once you get reading.

sitting back and looking at the various issues laying now on my desk and talking about the whole situation with steve, and some other friends, i am beginning to see the incredible potential of what these guys are trying to do here. more so than i perhaps did at first. it’s been too long since i’ve been excited by any publications of this kind (excluding of course the mighty little white lies), and i feel like?your days are numbered could comfortably be a part of any new vanguard movement striving to show people what a little free will, free press and design fundamentalism can achieve. i am very happy to be a part of this team and am excited to see where they steer this ship to next. i’ve been asking to be involved in magazines of one form or another for a long time, and in many ways i think i may well have found the most perfect spot to exorcise all the demons i have haunting my thoughts about the printed publication world.

we’re stoked to announce that we recently started working with paramount pictures.?the first fruit to bear is a website for the debut feature film from?david chase, creator of the sopranos. pictured is the teaser trailer site we were asked to create whilst we work on a larger website for the film. details are of course secret for now, but we’re excited about how its looking + where things are going. stay tuned for further updates in december, around the time the film is released!

you can view the teaser site here.

based on our work with big black delta, the fine folk at nerve management asked us to work on an aesthetic revamp for the german, minimal-house duo booka shade. we knew of the band in part because of their music, but also because HORT had handled their look up to this point. for the record HORT are one of the few design houses out there who’s work we look at on a regular basis for inspiration. therefore, as you can imagine, the prospect of taking on this mantle was both terribly exciting and very daunting.

that said, it turns out booka shade themselves were fans of the sleeve design + logo work we’d done for big black delta, and were keen for us to reproduce that very textured approach in a fashion more suited to their sound. we were given demos from their new record and spoke to the band about the sorts of aesthetic ideas they had in mind. the end result was a push by us to simplify their previous geometric logo type even further. we wanted to add an elegance, softness and wear to it, in order to create a more established and timeless feel. a feel that perhaps spoke as much of their origins as to where they were going next.

the first piece of work we produced for them you can see above. it’s the single cover for their forthcoming release?honey slave, and focusses mainly on the new logo we created for the band. the single will be out on DIM MAK records, and we’re more than a little excited to hold a 12″ vinyl copy of it in our hands.

you can hear samples from the honey slave single here.

we’re are thrilled to announce that our record sleeve for polinski’s debut album labyrinths has won a color in design award. this is the first time we’ve ever won an award for any print work we’ve produced. quite a thing.

winners will apparently be featured in?HOW?magazine (july issue), and?PRINT magazine?(august issue) as well as their websites, the pantone website, and celebrated in a newly created online color in design collection, appearing in later summer.

a huge thank you once again to kim at monotreme records for producing the project, to?branislav cirkovic?for his fantastic typography, and of course to our long-time friend and collaborator paul wolinski for making the incredible music that inspired it all. to commemorate the occasion – below is a previously unreleased digital copy of the poster we produced for the cd + vinyl versions of the release.

in other?polinski?news, we’re hard at work on visuals for the forthcoming future everything show in manchester england next month. stay tuned.

in july of 2011 i was staying in los angeles with some friends, needing some time out from everything. the one thing i had on my plate during my stay out there in the breezy dry heat, was a pitch document for a job we’d been put forward for by some collaborators of ours.

the job was to revamp the carbon war room?website. the carbon war room is a non-profit organization set up by richard branson?for the facilitation and realization of investment in sustainable low-emissions industries and technologies. in other words, an enterprise setup to help investors and entrepreneurs realize the financial benefits of ?going green? on a vast scale in today?s market.

version industries’ MO from the outset has been to fight to work for clients that we believe have something worthwhile to say or offer the world. this job was consequently very attractive to us as we knew we’d be able to put a good deal of work into helping, even in some immeasurably?small capacity, to change the state of the world today.

the trick of course was that we were pitching against 6 other companies for the job, a good deal of whom already worked in the environmental sector or?were already working for the carbon war room in some capacity. furthermore we’d never done a website of this kind before. this is something that always lets us down initially with new clients, as if we actually have never done any website before. by which we mean that we try with every job to do something entirely different every time. so the odds were against us, plus i was sort of on holiday and back in the new york studio everyone had 100 other pressing issues to attend to.

i talked it through with giles over the phone and we came up with a plan. he produced the words to describe our approach to this, and i sat down and started drawing some pictures, so to speak. the understanding we had of how best to handle this project (and as it turned out, this would be our advantage over everyone else competing) was that we needed to make this site engaging (they were getting horrid bounce-rates), less business-like (the current site felt like it was for some london law-firm, with ‘small print’ everywhere) and more enjoyable on the various new computing platforms out there (i.e. let’s make it big, fun, easy to scroll and hit buttons with your fingers on an ipad). for a company trying to offer a fresh approach to tackling the world’s major environmental concerns, their problems seemed clear to us in terms of design.

the key element we were shooting for in our pitch was something that later became known as the engagement component. this was very simple a colorful, quick, javascript driven tool that determined what type of person you the user were. it would then direct you to the part of the site that was relevant to you, explaining what the site had to offer to you, in your own terms.

the other elements we were suggesting in our pitch were conveyed by a series of quick mock-ups of our vision for the site using large format photography, a very spacious design and bold use of typography.

we packaged the whole thing up and sent it off. i went back into the sun with a sense that overall we possibly could have done better, but not sure how. it was just that feeling you have when you’re in someone else’s house in another part of the world, and you don’t quite have the same focus as you do when you’re in your own studio.

a week or so later were informed we were in the next round and that we’d caught their attention. a few weeks later, after some further interviews we were told we’d been selected to do the job. it was the first of a few radical changes for our company around this time, and was deeply affecting our general outlook. after almost 10 years of being around we were now getting the work we felt we were always made for. this meant of course that in return we had to thank them for doing so. we had to thank them in the only way we knew how – by doing the best job we could.

it was a vast task, encompassing initially a large main website completely integrated with their already blooming business forums on linkedin, and a smaller subsidiary site for one of the their latest active operations,?renewable jet fuels. there were many meetings with a great deal of back and forth over the various approaches we should take. a lot of new ideas were developed in this time that went beyond our initial pitch. the filter we provided, as they were so fond of saying in meetings, was to give their content a rock ‘n’ roll feel. not to be taken literally of course, but it simply meant we needed to make this attractive to people like us as well as people like them. this included providing infographics throughout the site with a certain wide-eyed, humorous and na?ve aesthetic –

and making the home page of renewablejetfuels.org look a little like the interior of an airplane –

one of the final elements to fall into place was their ubiquitous sonar.?they wanted us to translate their company logo and how it represented a map of the carbon war room’s various facilities into an interactive site navigation tool. this is the kind of thing we rarely get to do, and is always a pleasure. it involved sitting around, arguing the difference between ‘what would be cool’ and ‘what would annoy the hell out of people’ and finding some middle ground therein. you can see the results of this if you click on the company logo when you first hit the site.

it’s not often you get paid to make a difference. often you just have to do that kind of thing for free. embrace it when you get the chance. we’d like to extend a huge amount of thanks to mark grundy, david schwartz, peter boyd and the rest of the carbon war room team who made this project such a great pleasure to work on. there is of course more work yet to do, but right now seemed like an appropriate time to raise a glass to the experience.

cheers,

caspar was recently interviewed for black book magazine. here’s an excerpt from the piece –

how do you go about your creative process?
i?d say for me, it?s just read / watch / listen to anything you’ve been given a hundred times over until your brain is utterly saturated with and then just lie on your back and let your brain subconsciously do the work for you, and it will. it will tie, much the way dreams do, all manner of strange elements together based on personal experiences of old and the new elements you’ve introduced to it. in this way, i love the way david lynch?s writes his films. he?ll have one scene that?s just come to him out of nowhere that for some reason means a lot to him, and then another scene after it that?s this completely different — an unrelated thing that he also loves. he?s then compelled to put them in a film together and somehow find another scene that will perhaps connect them or explain why that was happening. it was the power of the two original scenes that lead to this new scene being made, rather than any sort of linear thinking process where you start with one scene and try and think of what might happen next. this is a hugely important way of approaching things because people don?t necessarily think ideas work like that.

you can read the rest of the interview?here.

i’ve just handed in my latest article for the IFP. in essence it’s a piece that questions how easy it is to assess the quality of a film (or any work of art) in an age where hype is everything. the article starts out with a proposed set of rules and then attempts to qualify them. these rules are as follows –

rule 1.?(to kill expectation)

go into the film without having read or watched anything. trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even?that?sometimes is questionable.

rule 2.?(to kill projection)

assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what kind of movie it is trying to be. do not project your own expectations. let the film dictate the level of expectation, be that tonally, narratively or conceptually.

then, assess how well you think the film reaches whatever goals it set out to achieve.

rule 3.?(to kill hype)

don?t talk about the film with anyone who has not seen it, except if you?re encouraging them to go see it. only discuss the film with those that have seen it, and discuss it?hard. that?s what it?s there for.

you can read the rest of the article here.

we’d like to thank gus mantel for allowing us to use his incredible animated gifs to illustrate the piece. you can view more of his work here.

to accompany the release of 65daysofstatic’s new record, a rescoring of the 1972 science fiction film silent running, i have written a fairly in depth article that discusses the creation of the artwork. the article is the third in a series that i’ve written for the independent filmmaker project and you can read an excerpt of it here –

so a week passed, the hurricane was about to hit and i knew where i had to go with this. i chose not to run the idea by the band, mostly as I simply had no idea whether i could successfully pull it off any way. i?d never really drawn spaceships before and whilst i had an inkling of how i was going to do it, i truly expected a messy failure of some description to result from it. sitting down at my machine as people along the brooklyn waterfront were taping big Xs in their windows like hundreds of fox mulders with too many unanswered questions, i began to piece things together. all of the while i couldn?t stop repeating over and over what sara goldfarb says at the beginning of the film?requiem for a dream,?as her son is stealing her television to pay for drugs –

?this isn?t happening. and if it should be happening, it would be all right. so don?t worry, seymour. it?ll all work out. you?ll see already. in the end it?s all nice.?

by which i think my brain was saying that sometimes you have to trust there?s a reason for your motivations, because sometimes your subconscious is simply way ahead of you.

you can read the rest of the article here.

the website for the feature film PAVILION went live today, and along with it my second blog article for the IFP in which i discuss the process that went into making the site. we were also fortunate enough to be asked to handle the film’s posters and the credit sequences. the article discusses this and explains why our treatment on all fronts aimed to reflect the very minimal, atmospheric nature of the film.

here’s an excerpt –

my co-worker zach referred me once to a film (portrait of jason, 1967) where a man is sitting there smoking a cigarette for pretty much the entire film. that?s it. talking about this on the way to get lunch one day we agreed that in a film like that, where that?s all that happens, the small things turn into huge events. zach then stopped, scratched his head and thought for a moment, whispering to the air in front of him, ?what was it that happened in that one??. i stopped too, waited, and then finally he said ?ah yes, he ran out of gas on his lighter. huge deal!? we both laughed and then stepped inside?jimmy?s, our regular lunch joint.

so to reiterate,?pavilion?really is one of those exact films. it?s almost fair to say that if you blink or cough, you could miss the entire ?reveal? at the end of it. there are tiny fragmented shards of dialogue that tell you what?s happening whilst all the while you?re watching the most detached, beautiful and mesmerizing footage of kids feeling out the moments in those long, long, useless days of our youth. in fact what i said when i came back from the bathroom after tim had screened his movie for us was ?congratulations?. congratulations for capturing that feeling of the abstract, aimless ennui of what it was to be young, with almost no sense of responsibility at all.

you can read the rest of the article here.

the above cover of the new big black delta album has existed in one form or another for a year or more. aside from the protomen act II logo, this is the longest we’ve had to sit on something and let it mature. it has therefore had to suffer being discarded a few times and consequently being heaved back onto the table for repair. this is largely because we were nervous and didn’t trust that the visual came close to the power of the music. thus we kept searching for a way to express that, and consequently found ourselves staring at this piece again and again, realizing it was the closest we’d ever come.

the idea behind this cover was essentially two-fold –

first up whilst the EP depicted elements passing through space toward something, the LP we felt should be emblematic of the place they were all headed – the core or nucleus sucking everything in. this way we had a story of sorts, both visually and conceptually. conceptually because, as with most EPs, the songs were tested out and then some found their final resting place on the LP.

secondly we wanted something that gave you the sense of being in a minute, inner-space, just as much as the more obvious, vast, outer-space setting the artwork appeared to depict at first glance. we wanted it to feel like the genesis of an idea, or the microscopic core of the beginnings of an erruption, as much as a planetoid or huge cataclysm in space. you see we were into the idea that jonathan bates’ first band, mellowdrone, had had an album cover with a man clutching his head as it exploded, and that subsequently this record was perhaps illustrating the inside of that same head. the nucleus of the eruption, be it psychological or physical, that lead to the head exploding. the assumption being that both images, for us, represented the state the band was in, the lyrics and the overall tone.

whilst big black delta is very much a more personal, solo musical endeavor for jon, mellowdrone saw him very much more in a band environment, in more of a democracy and also dealing with a sense of disenfranchisement. so the angry bear album cover was an external view of the result of a certain psychology, and the BBDLP1 cover?is a depiction therefore, also, of something more personal, from somewhere more unique to just jon.

beyond the hand-drawn elements themselves the cover was also treated with a level of distressing and texture. the reason for this is that the music itself was treated in a similar fashion. jon deliberately kept certain glitches and errors that happened in the processing or compression of each track in order to give it a more freeform and ‘fuck it’ attitude. so in turn we effectively threw the record on the floor at a UFO convention and let everyone stampede across it as they made their way from bob lazar’s talk on alien spaceship reverse engineering over to the preview screenings of the next series of ancient aliens.

so what next? well jon is of course working on new music and we’re already working on new artwork. as jim carroll says in the basketball diaries “come on, reggie, you know this game never ends.”

stay tuned.