Hardformat

Website improvements

Author: Colin | Published: 25/4/09

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Just to let you know what we’ve been doing lately on Hard Format:

We’ve got a new section called The Collections where people can display themed collections. Our first one of Jamaican 70s designs is courtesy of Dave Hendley. If you’ve an idea for one please get in touch!
We’re gradually building up The designers section with pages on Peter Saville, Julian House and Hipnosis in preparation. We’ve been promised material from ECM (Dieter Rehm and Barbara Wojirsch), Vaughan Oliver, Non Format, Malcolm Garrett, Trevor Jackson and Jon Wozencroft. Ian Anderson from Designers Republic was initially enthusiastic, but he’s not replying any more :-(
With today’s post (Susan Archie’s wonderful Charley Patton box) we’ve increased the image size a little from a width of 760 to 900 pixels and increased the gaps between the images, this hopefully shows off the designs better.
It’s taken a long time, but I think our photography has improved a lot in recent months. We’re standardising around black backgrounds (except for very dark designs which are on grey) and we’re sorting out pesky barrel distortion in Photoshop to make the images look right. It’s been a real learning curve.
At the top of each post there’s now a Next and Previous link so you can navigate through the site without having to return to the Contents page every time. Unfortunately my WordPress skills (or any coding at all in fact) aren’t great, so the link takes you to the next post in temporal order which may be a news item rather than the next weekly post. Hopefully it’s still useful though.
Numerous smaller tweaks – we’ve tidied up the main navigation in the sidebar and the information box below the images should be more legible. Oh and at time of writing we’ve nearly sorted out how to split up the news section so it’s not one incredibly long page! Many thanks to Houndworld for his help with that.

That’s about it, but we’re always on the lookout for great new design or guest posts, so don’t hesitate to let us know if you see anything. Thanks for reading.

Artist	Charley Patton
Title	Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues
Label	Revenant
Year	2001
Designer	Susan Archie: art direction and design, additional design and layout: Henry H. Owings, illustration: Potsy Duncan
Music	The Blues
Notes	Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues is such a playful, generous, imaginative design that it’s difficult to know where to start. It is an over-sized object that consists of box, binder, paperback treatise by John Fahey on Patton attached to the inside sleeve, lengthy and informative essays, pages of stickers reproducing the original record labels, numerous illustrations and photographs as well as the CDs themselves attached to 78-sized card mounts contained in facsimiles of the original sleeves. The whole package is based upon the original album format that collected 78s together in a single binder. There’s perhaps a deliberate and certainly pleasing irony, that Patton (whose legacy survived on poor quality recordings and was eclipsed by Robert Johnson’s tragic story/mythos) should be afforded such luxurious treatment. A similar tension exists around the likes of Goodbye, Babylon and Albert Ayler’s Holy Ghost box. Archie has spoken of the challenge to produce a design for an artist of whom there is but a single remaining photograph. She riffs on this through a variety of treatments and period illustrations. Note particularly the use of the ‘masked marvel’ illustration on the outer box (one of Patton’s songs was marketed thus by the record company) which is revealed unmasked in the same roundel on the binder. There’s something monumental about this examination of a historical figure who might otherwise have slipped into obscurity. The crackle of the recordings actualises the time and distance spied in the imagery, design and informed consideration of Patton’s art. In a related vein, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues exists as an admirable bulwark against the increasing virtualisation of the medium.

Reaching for the sublime in music design (album covers, cd art, record design)

Website improvements

Charley Patton – Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues

Victrola Favourites

Artur Nowak, Daniel Menche

Tristan Perich – 1-Bit Music

Goodbye, Babylon