Sound & Vision 01

July 29th, 2011 by Mat Dolphin

Music plays a big part in everyday life here at Mat Dolphin. We’re constantly listening to it, discussing it and plenty of our work has been inspired or related to it in some way. In fact, like many graphic designers, it was a large part of the reason we became interested in design in the first place. Pouring over the typography and layouts of our favourite album covers played a massively important part in shaping our design understanding and tastes. With the record sleeves shrinking from a 12inch gate-fold to a pixelated square on your phone, the art of record sleeve design has obviously changed and will probably continue to do so. I’m sure many of the brilliant examples of cover art we know and love wouldn’t exist today if they had to go through the approval process of any major record label. Which is a shame.

That said, we’re all about embracing change and this blog post certainly isn’t about crying about the good old days and getting nostalgic about the crackle of limited edition vinyl. Beautifully designed ways to package music releases in (physical or otherwise) is still with us and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

I’m fairly sure we’re not alone in our love of the marriage between great design and great tunes. There are countless books, websites and articles dedicated to the craft of creating the images which to go with music. One thing that often seems to get either overlooked or even completely ignored when discussing cover art is the music itself. With this in mind, we’ve come up with our pick of the design-geek-classic-covers of recent years, along with the actual songs contained within (sometimes not the most obvious choices). Sound & Vision will be a regular feature on the blog, showcasing music artwork we love alongside the tunes so you can listen while you read. Click below to have a look and, equally importantly, listen.

Keep reading…


Five Things 014

July 20th, 2011 by Mat Dolphin

Hello World.

Our blog has been comparatively quiet over the last couple of weeks, mainly due to ridiculous amounts of client work (which we’re not complaining about), looming deadlines and a couple of well deserved holidays in the sun. Feeble excuses aside, we’re back in your face like a plate full of shaving foam with another Five Things that have caught our interest this week.

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Blast / Bless

July 5th, 2011 by Mat Dolphin

Tate Britain‘s current exhibition is The Vorticists: Manifesto For A Modern World. We haven’t had a chance to see it yet but we’re definitely going to check it out before it closes on 4th September. The exhibition ‘celebrates the full electrifying force and vitality of this short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that was based in London but international in make-up and ambition’. Adopting the spirit of Blast – the art movement’s short-lived journal launched by Wyndham Lewis – Tate and Creative Review have teamed up to invite submissions on the themes of ‘Blast’ and ‘Bless’. The entries are currently available to view on the Blast/Bless Tumblr site and will be projected at Tate Britain during the upcoming Creative Review ‘Tweetup’ (apologies for the use of such a cringe-inducing word) on the 21st July.

Keep reading…