Atif Akin

David Bowie: The Next Day. That album cover design


There has been much discussion surrounding the cover of the new David Bowie album The Next Day so thought I would answer a few questions that people have asked about it.

– Why not a new image for the cover?
We wanted to do something different with it – very difficult in an area where everything has been done before – but we dare to think this is something new. Normally using an image from the past means, ‘recycle’ or ‘greatest hits’ but here we are referring to the title The Next Day. The “Heroes” cover obscured by the white square is about the spirit of great pop or rock music which is ‘of the moment’, forgetting or obliterating the past.

However, we all know that this is never quite the case, no matter how much we try, we cannot break free from the past. When you are creative, it manifests itself in every way – it seeps out in every new mark you make (particularly in the case of an artist like Bowie). It always looms large and people will judge you always in relation to your history, no matter how much you try to escape it. The obscuring of an image from the past is also about the wider human condition; we move on relentlessly in our lives to the next day, leaving the past because we have no choice but to.

– Why “Heroes”?
If you are going to subvert an album by David Bowie there are many to choose from but this is one of his most revered, it had to be an image that would really jar if it were subverted in some way and we thought “Heroes” worked best on all counts. Also the new album is very contemplative and the “Heroes” cover matched this mood. The song Where are we now? is a comparison between Berlin when the wall fell and Berlin today. Most people know of Bowie’s heritage in Berlin and we want people to think about the time when the original album was produced and now.

– Why the white square obscuring the image?
We worked on hundreds of designs using the concept of obscuring this cover but the strongest ones were the simplest – it had to be something that was in direct contrast to the image underneath but that wasn’t too contrived (we know all design is contrived, that is the essence of the word ‘design’). It would have been clearer to many people if we had scribbled all over the cover but that didn’t have the detachment of intent necessary to express the melancholy of the songs on the album. Obscuring Bowie’s image is also reference to his identity, not only in the past when he changed endlessly but that he has been absent from the music scene for the past ten years. Was this an act to hide his identity or that he has simply become more comfortable with it?

– Why is there no colour?
The title of the album The Next Day evokes numerous reference points, notably Macbeth’s speech ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow ’ which deals with the relentless onward push that any unnatural position of power requires. It also has the existential element of Waiting for Godot with waiting for The Next Day – these all seem to question the nature of existence so a monochrome palette seemed most appropriate to this feeling.

– Why didn’t you do a logo, or new design of his name on the cover?
We wanted the cover to be as minimal and undesigned as possible, we felt the most elegant solution was to use the original one from “Heroes” and simply cross out the title of the old album. It has the detachment appropriate for the atmosphere of the new album.

– What is the font you used for the main title?
It is a new font that we are working on called Doctrine – this is the first major use of it. Doctrine will be released in the coming weeks at VirusFonts.

– What is Bowie like to work with?
He is quite a private person, so no need to say too much about him other than that he is a pleasure to work with. Very intelligent, funny, serious when he needs to be and generous in his thoughts and actions.

– Is there anything else you can add?
Yes, having said all this, we know it is only an album cover with a white square on it but often in design it can be a long journey to get at something quite simple which works and that simplicity can work on many levels – often the most simple ideas can be the most radical. We understand that many would have preferred a nice new picture of Bowie but we believed that would be far less interesting and not acknowledge many of the things we have tried to discuss by doing this design. Finally we would like to give David Bowie great credit, he simply did what he always does which is to go with a radical idea and that takes courage and intelligence. That is why we love his music and love working for him.

http://virusfonts.com/news/2013/01/david-bowie-the-next-day-that-album-cover-design/

P-O-R-T-R-A-I-T: The Artist Who Draws With Letters

 
Designer Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich has embraced the possibilities of using fonts to illustrate images.
 
 
 

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/p-o-r-t-r-a-i-t-the-artist-who-draws-with-letters/266792/

To the list of great fine-arts materials—clay and marble, oil paint and watercolor, and the like—it may be time to add an entry: fonts. At least, doing so would account for the career of Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, a book cover designer and children’s author who makes typographic portraiture of famous authors from letters, numerals, and punctuation marks—using an inventive, playful method that draws from a history of inventive, playful portraiture.
His first children’s book, 2001’s Bembo’s Zoo (Henry Holt) began as a Christmas present for his young daughter. It’s an illustrated alphabet that shows children how to match letters and sounds with animal names. “I was trying to teach Portuguese to my then two-year-old daughter,” de Vicq, a Brazilian who’s based in New York, told me in an email exchange. “There were no bilingual alphabet books that we could use for both languages.” For examples, he pointed out, “A” is for “Alligator” in English, but in Portuguese the same animal is Jacaré. So he created his own abecedarium where each animal’s initial letter is the same in both languages.

“Since I consider myself a graphic designer, not an illustrator, the animals were fashioned out of a typeface called Bembo, the glyphs of which work very well both in large and small sizes—plus Bembo is a fun word for little kids,” he said. He restricted his animal portraits to being composed of only the letters in the animal’s name, and even made a typographical picture of himself instead of the typical, bland author photo.

The further potential of font-as-art quickly opened up to him: “After that, I started creating famous writer’s portraits out of different typefaces, in homage to the fact that letters are the basic staple of a writer’s work.” He limited himself to recognizable people, using only the letters (plus some punctuation glyphs) of the specific author’s name. The style of the typeface that he used needed to convey personality while suggesting the period in which the writer lived. Franz Kafka, for instance, was fashioned out of Ruzena Antiqua “to impart the feeling of Jewish woodcuts.” For Proust, he said the typeface Auriol expressed the French Belle Epoque. In 2008 these portraits were collected in Men of Letters and People of Substance (David Godine Publishers). He also used some of the same portraits in a promotional book and website for Adobe titled Words at Play.

“Part of the fun is to have a rigid set of limitations,” de Vicq said. “Otherwise, the decisions would become arbitrary and the work loses meaning. All the letters have to come from the writer’s name. The only two exceptions are that I allow myself to use the writer’s middle name (even though sometimes it might not be well known) and some punctuation glyphs of the same typeface to resolve some problems that a poor letterform can’t solve.”

While his methods are novel, De Vicq’s typographic imagery follows the tradition of the mannerist painter Arcimboldo, portraits of allegoric figures made from objects like fruits, vegetables and animals—though not type. Historical precedents for Bembo’s Zoo includes Curious George Learns the Alphabet by H. A. Rey and Margret Rey that play with letterforms to define aspects of animals (“A” for “Alligator” uses that letter as its mouth, for example). “Not exactly in the same vein, but with the same sensibility is the work of two of my design heroes Shigeo Fukuda and István Orosz,” he said, and indeed each figure exhibits a transformative surrealist mystique in their work.

It takes vision to imagine exactly how a human face will emerge from a jumble of digital typefaces. “At the start of each portrait, I am always afraid that it will not work, and sometimes they don’t,” de Vicq said. Failure occurs often because the writer has no single feature that defines their face – “or their name is too short.” He studies photographs, looking for defining features, then finds the most appropriate typeface for each personality. “I assemble all the letters of their name, both upper and lowercase, and I start playing.” Variations in type size are kept to a minimum, to create an even contrast. Some combinations don’t work: “I stay away of badly drawn type and from display typefaces that are too ornate or complicated.” But ultimately, there is a moment when everything fits together—like, say, the letters in a word.

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