musical
New guitar site – Guitar Design Reviews is born
Yes, the articles on Design Reviews I have written about guitars and guitar related design have been so very popular that I have decided to create the new, wonderful and very special Guitar Design Reviews website. That’s both .co.uk and .com folks. Since starting Design Reviews my favourite topic has been guitars really and it is good to have a dedicated domain for this area so I don’t bore the more general design/illustration bods who pass by here.
Guitar Design Reviews logo ideas
I’m still working on the look and design of Guitar Design Reviews, and there are some under-developed bits, such as the shop, but I’m quite happy at how far it has got to now with 4 pretty decent articles so far;
- The Harley Earl inspired tail-fin chrome guitar
- Jackson Surfcaster SC4 Guitar Review
- 5 all new original guitar headstock designs
- Fender Stratocaster and Aviator Sunglasses desktop wallpaper
And lots more articles coming up of course. As well as the above I have another 6 headstock designs done, 3 other guitar body designs done and I have material for about another 4 guitar reviews right now. That’s not bad going.
Update – I am up to approximately 25 published articles now. Also I have moved the guitar headstock articles from here to there!
Please head on over and have a look! Mark
Illustrator designed CD covers
A couple of years ago I designed some CD covers to match up with some music I recorded and had on old tapes in boxes in the garage! I recorded a lot with a couple of friends in about 1990 or so. Recently with the increased power offered by the average computer and the availability of cheap or even free software to record and multitrack I got interested in making music again. Using just my old Strat, computer and a wah wah pedal I have made quite a few new recordings. The original lineup of friends now live quite a long way away and we haven’t met for years but I have replaced them with synthesised and computer generated versions! And they don’t argue with me!
Here are the four album/CD covers I designed, one includes a sound clip to go with it, recorded about 3 years ago.
We control the horizontal, click to play clip!
Ebbs; We control the horizontal (Clip)
The following don’t have sound clips attached at the moment. Quagmire was mixed down at half speed for the first few seconds by accident, but I liked it so kept that in 
Quagmire (unsightly return)
A BBC theme inspired piece of music follows, made on a Yamaha keyboard in 1992
Sherlock foams
Finally back to some distorted “space rock”;
Space Sponge
inspired by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which I had just got for Christmas a year or two before in the late 1980s!
If I get some comments about this I might put up more samples other than just for “We control the horizontal”, the other three CD covers are associated with tracks from around 1990. All the CD covers are designed and illustrated in Adobe Illustrator. I used photoshop a little on the Space Sponge CD above for inserting the sponge into the helmet and making the moon into a green sponge!
You might notice the first of the 4 CD covers has a different logo, this new logo is for new stuff since 2006, just things recorded by myself. Also I’ve found out there’s some band in the US of A called “The Ebbs” so the name’s gone already. I wonder if the name was gone in 1990 when we made the first recordings…
Wabi-Sabi, the beauty of imperfection
Isn’t being perfect a bit weird? Well it is for us humans, but for the things we covet and buy a lot of the stuff can possibly be ‘perfectly formed’. Shiny new iPod, shiny new BMW etc etc. That is until you get up to the very high end of things, oddly, where ‘hand made’, ‘craft’ and ‘characterful’ become major selling points. Now words like rustic, antique and crafted replace flawless, pristine and precision made.
Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese aesthetic which embraces objects of art with imperfections, roughness and asymmetry. It’s a kind of art I liked without even knowing there was a name for it, until now… More than once the Design Reviews blog has discussed eroded, aged, worn, halftoned and other ‘lo-fi’ effects in illustrator and vector graphics in general.
distressed, worn and reliced vs brand spanking new
Guitar enthusiasts have been buying into hand-made and artificially aged or ‘reliced’ guitars for quite a while now, look at the picture above. A relic will have quite a premium on the price tag! Just think of how many years you would have to own and play a guitar to make it look that used. Quote: “Fender’s Relic line accounts for more than 12% of its $5 million annual sales.” Another very popular market for aged and worn appearance is clothing; think of faded stonewashed jeans and distressed leather jackets. Of course don’t forget antiques either.
As I noted earlier the Wabi-Sabi idea can be put into your illustration and logo work quite easily now with the modern versions of illustrator which are less about pure lines and shapes than before. There’s a lot of vector tools that can cross over into areas that were once Photoshop only avenues.
I have a couple of other articles planned about Wabi-Sabi style graphics, beauty and design coming up which I think will be very interesting. And I hope to put up some polls for feedback too. Come back next week!
CD cover for The Ebbs (UK) – Russian Skidoo
The song ‘Russian Skidoo’ has been recorded since summer 2005, now I’ve only just got around to making the CD cover for it. I drew all the trees and snow textures on a background layer in Illustrator. Also in separate layers I drew the guy and the skidoo. That look a while, balancing the amount of detail to be sketched with what I wanted the finished article to be like.
Illustrating the shapes of the skidoo was no problem but it took three revisions to draw the helmet! The picture I was looking at had a guy with lots and lots of stickers on the helmet and I got too involved working close up and made something far too detailed, twice. This picture is of a guy speeding through the night in a snow storm so it’s not necessary at all to have that detail. Then when I finished I fired up Photoshop and used a combination of the motion blur and the wind tools. The snow wasn’t so tricky, inserting a new layer in Photoshop
The Ebbs (UK) - Russian Skidoo
I’m quite happy with the result, from the ingredients I started with. If I were to do it again I would focus on a detail of the skidoo, coming almost straight towards the viewer, perhaps looking like it’s about to run into the camera. Could do that for the back cover though… If it’s better it can be swapped with the front image! Sound clip here; The Ebbs (UK) – Russian Skidoo.
Cheers, Mark