As I am (usually) a man of my word, I followed through with the design I’d been floating in my head. Overall it came out about how I wanted it to:

(click for a larger version)

If you like, you can also download the PDF in 300 dpi at 8.5 x 11 for printing.

I’m going to see how it looks on paper tomorrow, I hope it looks okay at 8.5 x 11, otherwise I might scale it to 11 x 17 (fortunately since it’s all font work, it’s easily scalable).

The design was inspired by a combination of elements. First: Chris, another DJ, has a flier for his show with a huge list of bands he plays on it, and I had always seen it and thought “I should display that kind of information somehow!” Second: there was a recent collection of grammy awards artwork that created portraits of band members with the song titles of some of the music that influenced them. It was neat, but the colors were fruity and it used a bunch of ugly fonts that just didn’t do it for me. I took the concept and did a “portrait” of my existing logo made entirely of band names. When all was said and done, it lacked a tiny bit of cohesion without the original tracing image behind it, so i lowered the opacity way down, blurred it out a bit, and left it in the background, for the trace of the original logo, to keep it more easily recognizable.

The general rule was that my favorite bands got larger billing, but in the end that occasionally went out the window, as I found myself remembering certain bands way after the fact and putting them in as an afterthought, not really wanting to rearrange the entire composition to fit them in. Still, most of the bands I like are here, although I overlooked a massive portion of my collection. Oh yeah, and I don’t think I repeated any names, I challenge you to find any (or a typo: hint – “zeigeist” is not a typo).

One more fun fact: there are 240 artists in the image. Those were hand selected (and hand typed, phew) from over 1300 or so artists in my collection.

I’ll probably find out tomorrow that there’s some kind of program that could’ve automated this process for me. Anyway… yay for wanking off on a sunday!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Art, Music, News, Photoshop. 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.