June 4th, 2010
New Work
New Weird Australia—

I’m very pleased and excited to reveal some of the designs I’ve been working on for New Weird Australia – an initiative founded by Stu Buchanan that’s designed to promote and support new eclectic and experimental Australian music.

The project began life as an ongoing weekly radio show on FBi Radio Sydney, which is hosted by Stu and features new music, performances and interviews. It soon expanded into a bi-monthly free compilation download, and now the project is expanding its horizons even further with live shows, events and more.

I was contacted by Stu – an award winning designer and seriously excellent human being – to help take the project to the next level with an identity design that includes a logo, poster designs, web design, and artwork that can be used in everything from advertising to album art.

Stu and I share a strong love of classic Swiss modernist design, and this formed the core of the visual direction for the project, with sans-serif typography, simple shapes and clean layouts built on grids and formal structure. From day one there was the desire to use the simplicity, functionality and beauty of this design theory as a foundation, and build something new, unique and personal from there.

We also looked at Julian House’s work for Ghost Box as a point of inspiration, which itself has a particularly evocative and unique take on Swiss modernism. The Ghost Box artwork is interesting in that it retains a certain amount of formal structure and sameness with each edition, however it also changes and evolves over time while still somehow maintaining its essence and identity. The imperfections in the designs and the overall ambience of the collection is something that provided great inspiration too.

Other points of design inspiration have come from the work of Kim Hiorthøy, German studio Hort, and Sydney based Mark Gowing, who have all done extensive, ongoing design work for musicians and record labels. These designers share a commonality in their work in that it is often strikingly modern while also featuring quite gentle, handmade qualities. It is this philosophy and style that I have worked on achieving with New Weird Australia.

The idea for the logo itself (shown at the top of the page) came to me quite quickly. While I explored a variety of different ideas for a logomark (mostly playing with the letterforms of NWA), the idea of simply rendering the name in a beautiful sans-serif font with a few of the letters either backwards or upside down just seemed to click. I felt that this approach was most in-keeping with our overall direction, and would ultimately be the most modular and adaptable way to go, while still possessing a genuine personality of its own. It is designed to be strong, immediate and timeless.

The typeface used in both the logo and all supporting material is Nimbus Sans by URW++. I wanted a strong, simple grotesque sans-serif that was similar to Helvetica or Akzidenz, but less commonly used. Nimbus (released in 1999) was actually based on Helvetica, so it was a perfect fit.

The logo has each word set in title-case, and features at least one letter facing backwards. The letter spacing is tight and considered, yet slightly imperfect. I like the fact that there’s a subtle element of “weirdness” to the logo, without it being heavy handed or obvious. The weirdness isn’t the defining quality of the logo, it’s just one element. At first glance the type treatment almost looks normal, but upon closer inspection it’s revealed that something isn’t quite right. I think that given the diversity of the music promoted by the project, it was best to create a simple logo with just a hint of oddness about it in order to truly allow for the content to speak for itself and encompass the many different musical styles.

Like the logo, the concept for the artwork and layout design came to me quite early on in the process too. Essentially, the idea is based around a 4×4 square grid which can be filled with a collection of assets that include basic shapes, colours, textures and images. All these elements can be combined in an almost infinite number of ways, thus giving the project a strong visual identity that is flexible enough to evolve over time and present something unique at each iteration.

The square grid means that the artwork can fit perfectly in an album cover, it can leave plenty of room for copy on a poster, and will be able to adapt nicely throughout its use on the website.

Here’s the first sample of the logo, final artwork and identity system in use – as a poster for an upcoming New Weird Australia show on Friday 23rd July at Red Rattler, Sydney). The artwork features scanned cardboard textures (with colours modified in Photoshop), hand-drawn repeating textures from the fabulous resource Neubau Modul, and some slightly haunting images taken from an old book on the history of magick. The images were chosen for their sense of being slightly otherworldly and out-of-time, as well as for the story that they tell when placed together. The shapes themselves were chosen for how they look and interact with eachother, as well as the interesting white space that they create when placed together.

There’s definitely an element of controlled chaos at work, and the final result is largely judged on what just looks and feels right. I imagine this almost intuitive approach to how everything gets pieced together will continue to be explored. Each shape in the collection is a vector graphic, and is designed to be scalable for all purposes and sizes – provided it fits within the 4×4 grid. Once the shape layout is worked out, the vectors are then brought into Photoshop for textures and images to be added. Slight overlaps and imperfections in this process are left as part of the artwork.

The aesthetic is deliberately lo-fi, and with the set of rules and assets in place, we can push the design forward without too much risk of overworking or polluting the identity. Where it all goes from here is unknown, which is one of the things that I’m most excited about with the project. While we have all the basic elements designed for now, working out how they will come together each time, what materials will be used, what themes will be explored and how the concept might evolve is something that I’m really looking forward to discovering.

It was an absolute pleasure to work on this project, not simply because I was able to experiment with the sort of design that I personally enjoy, but because the project itself is so great, and run by someone who is passionate and personally invested in what they’re doing.

Stu and I are currently working on the redesign of the website, which should be up soon. We have some tentative plans for other places the design will appear, so keep your eye out for new additions in the series. And don’t forget if you’re in Sydney during July, make sure you get along to the show, I’m sure you’ll be surprised and captivated by what you hear.