No posts on the blog for a week or so as I was at Glastonbury, so here, by way of an appeasement are some Instagrams I took instead…

Tourists’ photos all look the same don’t they?

That’s what Corinne Vionnet thought, in fact she went and proved it by overlaying hundreds of tourist photos from the internet. The result is a series of ghostly images of famous landmarks. They’re really lovely and make you wonder how people assess the optimum view of the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. There’s a sort of collective agreement that they should be seen from a certain perspective. Perhaps it’s something to do with symmetry or an obvious vantage point.

But she must have been pretty selective, as we all know most tourists prefer to stand in front of iconic landmarks they’ve waited their lives to see and obliterate them with the head of their mum/dad/daughter/son who they see every day. Funny that.

Whenever I come back from holiday and offer to show my snaps to my Dad, he always asks me if there are any with people in them this time, knowing that otherwise he’s going to have to sit through hundreds of bits of found type, buildings, signs and overhead wires. Perhaps I should stick my head in the way more often then…

Found via Design Taxi

We were treated to a visit by Storm Thorgerson last week, album cover design legend and, as it turns out, very entertaining guy. Storm’s portfolio is overwhelming, famous for working with Pink Floyd and creating arguably the most iconic album cover of all time in Dark Side of the Moon, but has since worked with bands as diverse as Anthrax, Muse, The Offspring, Audioslave and Biffy Clyro. He admits he doesn’t always like the music, but that’s mainly because he often has to listen to it repeatedly during the design of the artwork. Storm told us that he was going to “show pictures, tell you how I did them, or what I was trying to do.” which worked for me. He also said at one point:

“I wouldn’t buy a record for it’s cover, and I wouldn’t expect anyone else to.”

…which was fantastic and kind of set the tone of the evening. He split his work into sections, which rather suspiciously spelled out his name…

S is for Sets & Scupltures

“If we get a chance to build something we do it”

Storm clearly loves to make stuff. The example below from Anthrax’s Stomp 442 album was never a whole sphere. Instead it was a quarter sphere, rotated and manipulated to create a composite image. Storm told us of his fascination for spheres, and the fact that “you never know what’s inside them, if they’re solid or hollow”

Anthrax ‘Stomp 442′ 1995

T is for Tales

“Things are richer with a story, so I try to encourage people to make one up, even if it’s not the one I intended.”

For the Biffy Clyro album Puzzle, Storm fixated on the fact that lead singer and songwriter Simon Neil’s mother had recently died. The figure in the foreground is in a fetal position, something which Storm associated with grief, and the missing piece is just beside him, although he can’t see it. A detail often missed is that of a figure being forcibly removed from the room, symbolic of having a loved one wrenched away. This is Storm’s own story, based on his understanding of the band and their music.

Biffy Clyro ‘Puzzle’ 2007

O is for Obsessions

“How much can you persuade someone to look again?”

Storm told us that he simply loved the idea of taking a cow and photographing it for the front cover of Pink Floyd’s 1970 album. The randomness of this delighted him “I’m lucky I’ve worked for people who don’t know any different. They didn’t know if my work was any good, any more than I did.” The cow was an instinctive idea and not over-thought, eventually ending up reproduced at huge scales incongruously across billboards worldwide. Storm’s insistence and the support of the band made sure it happened.

Pink Floyd ‘Atom Heart Mother’ 1970

R is for Real

“Design is in the doing”

The photograph for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here is impressive stuff. Storm is proud that he actually set a man on fire to achieve it. Interestingly, he told us that to start with the figures were the other way round, but the prevailing wind set the unlighted man’s moustache on fire, so it was rearranged.

Pink Floyd ‘Wish You Were Here’ 1975

M is for Models

“It’s better to have something good than something shit”

Storm’s Back Catalogue is exactly that. Not a row of polite captioned JPEGs but the album covers painted on the back of lovely ladies. That’s the sort of thing you can get away with if you’re Storm Thorgerson.

It was a great talk and the man himself was very happy to talk about any aspect of his work. I decided not to mention the fact that I used to design CD covers, because those were mainly the kind of ones you find in motorway services bargain bins. Two more which he brought with him were a long term favourite of mine for Muse…

…and the newest Biffy Clyro album cover, which was frankly amazing.

Not many people make album covers like that any more.

You can see a clip of Storm talking about his work here and the poster I designed for the event here. After the talk, he even signed my copy of Dark Side of the Moon, and you can tell he’s a visual perfectionist, because he did it along one side of the prism. I liked that.

As the year draws to a close, the nights get longer and the rain soaks into your shoes as you walk down the street, it’s a good job these guys are around to cheer us all up.

If you’re a graphic designer and you’ve designed a poster, you have to photograph it being held by the top two corners. Don’t ask me why, it’s the law. Clean under your fingernails and get to it.

This trend has long since jumped the shark, in fact even this blog post is passé, but now you can follow the evolution of the meme and keep up to date with various attempts to keep the art of poster holding alive, lest it dies out forever at Poster Goatse. We must not let it go unrecorded for future generations.

There’s graphics, there’s ingenuity, there’s careful finger placement, forgery and unbuttoned cuffs, there’s even titillation…

And they are doing sterling work, tirelessly researching the origins of the phenomenon…

Take a look at the site, the acerbic commentary alone is worth it. What’s a goatse? You’ll wish you never asked…

Photoshop in real life. Lovely attention to detail! Apparently it’s part of an ad campaign for something called CS4…

Seen over at Swiss Miss, originally uploaded to Flickr by wandaaa, so you can see it larger over there…