When the worlds of Back to the Future and Graphic Design mix, you can be sure I’m all over it like a rash.

Neon Neon, Boom Bip’s collaboration with Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals has resulted in the album ‘Stainless Style’ with accompanying picture disc singles following the theme. Stainless steel, diagonal lines and lovely ladies. I’m off to their site for a listen…

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I read yesterday on the Creative Review blog about the Flickr CD cover meme, the graphic design equivalent of one of those ‘what’s your porn star name?’ things. As someone who used to do a lot of CD covers in a commercial context, it made me smile.

The idea is simple, you take the first article title from this page as your band name…

Then you use the last four words in the last quote from this page as your album title…

And finally, you use the third picture from here, no matter what it is.

My result is above, as you can see I lucked out on the picture, but I really like the band name now too. I imagine they have a wicked PowerPoint presentation in their stage show…

You can see the rest of the Flickr pool here.

Hard-Fi’s new album Once Upon a Time in The West is due to come out soon and it’s caused a bit of a stir due to it’s cover design – some people are even calling it the worst of all time…

To be honest, I like it, and I quite like the reference to the digital age, even though most people seem to be finding it a bit lazy, and I like how it is being continued through the single releases. I like it, but then again I’m a graphic designer and a sucker for simple type and colour like this. (In blue it could almost be “Holster®: the album”, which in turn could almost be “Grafik: the website” etc etc. The ubiquity of Avantgarde-esque typefaces in graphic design circles does seem to be getting very pronounced. I still remember getting repeatedly told off at art college for trying to use Futura all the time, but I digress…

…hope the album’s good…

www.hard-fi.com