So then, Hardcore Lives 009 has hit the virtual shelves.  It’s an EP from Richie K, and as you’d expect from Hardcore Lives! Records, it’s a slice of rather dark old-skool flavoured action.  Instead of a full review this time I’d like to muse on the covers, so I’ve embedded the official Flash sampler below for your audio perusal.

Musings on the cover artwork, plus super bonus rejected version after the jump!

The brief for doing the cover for this release was basically “make it like a 1994 rave flyer” – easier said than done.

Firstly, I was about 12 at the time and my meagre collection of flyers harldy inspired great artistic vision.  However,further research vindicated my teenage promo-collecting skills, as I discovered that actually they were more or less all pretty shit.

Consequently – and secondly – this meant that I’d have to go for that same amateur “home-made” look.  I actually got a slight headache while applying too many Photoshop filters, over-stretching some Times New Roman and comping together a mass of unrelated imagery into some arbitrary high-tech faux sci-fi image.  Turned out pretty well in the end, but it went through the most iterations of any design I’ve done in a long while.  There was no particular direction – it was a case of spending a few hours shoving things around the page until they approached an uneasy equilibrium.

As a design process, it probably mirrored the rave culture aesthetic quite well.  The intentionally over-heavy weight of the text down the left-hand side still makes me wince slightly, mind you.

…and finally, here’s something I literally knocked up in about 5 minutes during the whole thing.  Although just an experiment with a “back of an envelope” idea,in a curious way I actually prefer the minimalism to the “final” product.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Hardcore Lives!, Music, Whimsy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.