If you’ve enjoyed the website, please accept my apologies. I’m in two minds whether to continue with the site or not. My reasons are as follows:
- – Hard Format is such a strange pastime! It involves sourcing designs (I get sent some work by labels and designers, but not enough), photographing them, post-processing and setting up each weekly post (uploading the images, finding music samples, typing out the credits and writing about the design). It’s pretty repetitious and though I’m proud of the website and think it makes for a valuable/unusual/eccentric/interesting resource, I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing over and over since April 2007…
- – My day job is as a web manager for a large art college so there’s overlap of the mundane tasks
- – The site is up and down like a yoyo on Slicehost which is frustrating, but moving to a new host is quite a hassle
- – I’ve never managed to get the site mentioned in the places where I think it would have a chance of gaining a bigger audience, specifically The Guardian and The Wire magazine
- – I’m as huge a fan as ever of an ever-growing range of music, but as the result of the ending of a long-term relationship I’m also broke and unable to keep buying records like I used to
- – I’m increasingly passionate about my photography which takes up much of my spare time.
I still believe in the importance of physical media, even if it’s becoming a niche area. I’m not a big fan of the ever-growing number of expensive special editions. I think the work of Second Language and Kraftwerk best represent the twin poles of what I love about music design.
All of the above doesn’t mean that Hard Format is over. I’m still thinking about it. I have a few more posts to publish. In the meantime, I suggest you follow the site on Twitter/RSS/Facebook so you’ll get a notification of new posts. You should also read DJ Food’s blog and { feuilleton }, both great resources for intelligent and passionate commentary on visual matters, frequently music-related.
Thank you for reading.