Music

Michael Bierut|Essays

Designing Twyla Tharp's Upper Room

Jennifer Tipton's lighting design for Twyla Tharp's dance piece, In the Upper Room, creates a magical experience for the audience and brings her often unseen art to the foreground.

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Self-Initiated House Music

Sketches and Spells, CD cover by Julian House for Ghost Box, 2005.British graphic designer Julian House is best known for his album covers for Primal Scream, Stereolab and Broadcast. In the UK, House has an attentive following among designers attracted to his idiosyncratic, …

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Decoding Coldplay's X&Y

At a time when invisible data streams of binary information fed straight to our desktops are doing away with the need for album covers, it's odd to find a record sleeve as the subject of media comment and speculation. Odder still that the album cover in question — Coldplay's X&Y …

Rick Poynor|Essays

But Darling of Course it’s Normal: The Post-Punk Record Sleeve

There have been collections of post-punk music and now, finally, there is British music critic Simon Reynolds' 500-page history of the genre from 1978 to 1984. It's a brilliant book. He argues that post-punk music's explosion of creativity equals the golden age of popular music in the …

Lawrence Weschler|Essays

The Aural As An Architectonic Challenge

I think of design in wider than simple visual, or visual-textual, or visual-spatial terms. Rarely, it seems, is the aural considered as an ongoing architectonic challenge, which is what the people over at Transom.org are up to. As it happens, this month is a very good time to pay them a …

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

Rise and Fall of Rock and Roll Graphic Design

Browsing recently through a collection of "band fonts," my memory drifted back to Middle School where I, plastic Bic in hand, would spend countless hours carefully inscribing the covers of my Mead notebooks with the logos and signature fonts of my favorite bands: the bewinged logos of …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Theory with a Small "t"

A critical writing determined by the need to shape practice will be limited in the cultural insights it can offer. This is the last thing that design writing needs when ways to engage a wider public could be opening up.