Three is a Magic Number

This week, My mum and dad were away on their holidays and when they leave me in control of the house; I have to do a project to further myself. It's odd. The last time they were away; I did RedesigningNE. This time, having done all the branding I feel comfortable shaking a stick at, I decided to improve my video skills. It was once suggested by a potential freelance design client; that I try a lyric video. I kinda took that note too far and made three lyric videos.

As regular readers of this blog will know (or you saw my post last week); Back to Basics are my (ex?) band. Well I was the song writer and drummer. Well...I mean...I wrote some songs and I played drums. It is/was one of the best things that I have ever done. I loved most of it (the second album sessions were difficult) and playing gigs in front of people is such a thrill.

I chose three songs from our first album because they are the most accessible and because they are the best recorded tracks. It was a pleasure listening to the tracks again; some bum notes, quite a few bits of speeding up and slowing down and some corny lyrics.

I made them in photoshop despite it being a limited video editor, it's functional and it saved me downloading and installing After Effects/Premiere Pro. I limited myself to one typeface; Gotham Bold (a different yet very functional font) because I wanted myself to challenge myself to make something exciting with something so limited.

Here are the tracks in order of creation;

Back to Basics / kcaB ot scisaB

Back to Basics were a popular beat group from the North East of England from 2010. Featuring the talented guitar player; Phillip Reay and the designer/drummer James Reay. The latter has recently started a campaign to redesign and repackage the Back to Basics trio of albums and the live album. 

I am the latter band member and below are my simple typographic interpretations of some of the Back to Basics 'hits' and a simple dabble of colour. Looking back the album covers and singles were suitable at the time but a facelift can sometimes be seen to be a good thing.

Back to Basics? Who are they?

Obscure northern indie bands aren't hard to come by, But obscure northern indie bands that played a few gigs and did radio interviews are hard to come by. I bet not many people did that. Obscure northern indie bands that feature played a few gigs and did radio interviews are hard to come by and feature James Reay and Phillip Reay lead you to one band. Back to Basics were (are?) an indie punk band from the north east of England and they had three albums, one EP, a few live albums and one vinyl single all before fading into folklore. They did play the O2 academy 2; Bruce Foxton once stood on that stage.

The designer was the drummer and he is me. The bands design was a bit rubbish, or of it's time so I have been trying to salvage it a little bit by doing a selection of posters based on some of the bands output. I have done six. of which you can see the six now. I will be doing more as I want a full set so I can put them up on my wall. I loved being in that band. I nearly killed my brother during the second album but it was great fun. I must of been a pain to work with too. He nearly killed me. Several rehearsals, we couldn't play or if we did it was for twenty mins.

Here is a link to the music; https://soundcloud.com/back-to-basics

 or if you wanna play some now. see the song below;

A Club Like No Other

An explosion of fun would be had at this club. That's why I wrote and recorded a song about it, then designed the sleeve for it as if it was a single. I've chose the pop art feel because the lyrics of the song references a few points in pop culture. Inspired by the Hacienda club in Manchester, its all about having a good time and that is what I have tried to achieve visually.

Back to Basics

This was a project that I did for my band Back to Basics. We were doing a release for a present for our mother (our joint biggest fan w/ my dad). At the time I was very inspired by the ideas and concept laid down by David Carson; a hero of typography who challenged legibility of type while still trying to convey the message. That is what you can see on the back of the sleeve; layers and layers type all fighting for attention. The Front is more simplistic that the back but in the sense follows the same principles. Is the B still readable as a B if the two holes in it are covered up? yes. These are my favourite covers from the project because you can see where the ideas are coming from. The final covers were very straight forward and lack the ambition I started with.