The new Tycho single "Adrift / From Home" is now available direct from the MP3 shop in DRM-Free 320Kbps MP3 format. It was previously available exclusively through iTunes but can now be purchased at the new Tychomusic Shop and all other major digital music retailers. You can also purchase all the other Tycho releases at the Shop.
If you had previously purchased MP3s direct through the old system you may know that it was far from perfect. The new shop has been rebuilt from the ground up and functions far better than the previous system with instant downloads and full user account control.
In case you missed it the first time around, below are some clips of the songs from the new single. You can hear the full version of Adrift at the Tycho Myspace page.
Via Grain Edit: "Dutch Type specimen sheet from Lettergieterij in the Netherlands. Most likely from the late 1950s / early 1960s." Another example of great Dutch design, loving these colors
This Otl Aicher-designed Olympic poster is from Blanka. I see them linked on FFFFOUND all the time but I really don’t know what they’re all about. At first I thought they were an agency but now I think they’re just some sort of design shop with all sorts of cool stuff that is never in stock. At any rate, it’s fun to look at the pictures; they have an extensive archive of vintage poster prints.
I’ve been locked in the studio for a while preparing to record some new tracks for the upcoming Tycho album. I reconfigured my whole setup and it’s finally all coming together. I’ve finally added a true analog mixing console and it’s really changed the workflow, been saving a lot of time. Above is a partial shot of the studio in it’s current form, still a ways to go with the acoustics, but I’ve been making do.
On a side note, I temporarily moved back to Windows XP32 since they don’t make the software I use to record (Sonar) for Mac. I installed Photoshop and it’s been running so bad, crashing all the time. Meanwhile, on the Mac side, solid as a rock. I really wish I could just work inside of OS X full time, but Logic and Pro Tools just can’t hang with Sonar in my book. Oh well, here’s hoping for a solid Windows 9.
Matt Maust is the Bassist for Cold War Kids and a great designer as well. Their album Robbers & Cowards has really been a sleeper hit for me. I first became aware of them a while back but sort of thought Hospital Beds was cool and left it at that. But lately I’ve been working to the record and really enjoying it as a whole.
Today I checked on their site to see what they were all about and was greeted by the lovely image you see above. Once inside it just gets better. I’m always a sucker for the big-gothic-type-on-photographs motif, and here it’s done very well. Even with the most talented designers, a lot of the time you can see through to the fact that the artwork for a band was project / money driven. In the case of an outfit like Cold War Kids, I think the (literally) DIY design ethic shines through to great effect. But at the end of the day, it’s not how you look as a band, it’s how you sound.
For those of you that view this blog with a Flash-Enabled browser you may have noticed that the post titles are laid out in Trade Gothic LT Std Extended. This is done using a ridiculously complicated method of swapping out the HTML text and rendering it in Flash. The system that does this is called sIFR, it’s a huge jumble of Javascript and Flash that I really couldn’t make heads or tails of for a long time. As a result, the titles were not clickable, meaning you couldn’t actually click them to get through to the permanent home of the given post. Well after my recent plea for web help, Karl Peterson stepped up and answered the challenge. He made short work of the sIFR problem and so now, as you can see (or click), the titles are finally working flawlessly. Thanks Karl!
Karl Peterson is a designer / developer out of Bellingham, WA. You can view his portfolio at sidearmdesign.com.
I saw this poster plastered all over a construction site by my house a while back and was really struck by how well executed it was for a modern movie poster. I had been meaning to post it but had totally forgotten until Joris commented on it in the 100 Greatest Movie Posters post. You really don’t see design of this caliber and style in the movie industry anymore. I am assuming this was an early version of the poster. I read somewhere that the big studios will commission an early, more subdued / subversive version of movie posters far in advance of the release and then they come with the tried and true (and boring as hell) final version replete with giant heads and random quasi-illustrative open space backdrops. It’s so formulaic, but I suppose they’ve done their homework and that’s what moves the masses. Sad. Thanks Joris for the reminder on this one!
Extra Credit: This seems to be a similar still to the one used for the poster, give you an idea of the sort of photo manipulation that went into the poster version, very nice. Also, here’s another, infinitely worse, version of the poster.
Over at Tccandler there’s a post on "The 100 Greatest Movie Posters". It’s a nice collection and while most are not aesthetically quite my style, they are all successful in one way or another. I’ve included one of the few I would actually hang on my wall above, Saul Bass’ poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Link
