by jydesign | Jan 1, 2021 | Music
Over the last decade or so, I’ve had the chance to work with the band The Dogmatics on different illustration and design projects.
These have included things like show posters, “merch” graphics (t-shirts, clothing, stickers, pins, etc.), and album artwork.
Here’s a cool picture of Dicky Barrett, lead vocalist of The Mighty Mighty BossToneS & Jimmy Kimmel Live! announcer, wearing a “Thayer St.” t-shirt from 2019.
To celebrate New Year’s Eve 2020, The Dogmatics band re-released a compilation that includes 21 of their classic songs, on Rum Bar Records. The cover includes a guitar pick illustration that I had originally created for merchandise use.
Rumor has it that the band hopes to record some more new music in 2021 to follow up on their 2019 EP “She’s the One“. In the meantime, give their classic 80’s Boston garage rock tracks a listen.
by jydesign | Oct 10, 2019 | Music
Here’s a personal-perspective case study on how I had the opportunity to collaborate with the band and their label on both the recordings and design to support their latest release.
The Dogmatics have contributed to the Boston rock scene since the early ’80s. Read their backstory here. Two thousand nineteen marks a momentous new chapter for the band, their family, friends, and fans.
The Dogmatics announced this July that they had joined the local label Rum Bar Records and would be releasing their first new material in over thirty years. Jerry Lehane, Tom Long, Peter O’Halloran, and Jimmy O’Halloran (in honor of their late brother Paul) were laying down new tracks. Garage rockers in New England and around the world rejoiced in anticipation.
My family and I have been close to the band and its extended circle for many years. For over a decade, I’ve been a member of The Hired Men, a band that includes members of The Dogmatics among a gloriously amoeba-like group of other established local musicians. Our two bands have played together and even combined forces for live shows.
When they asked me to play mandolin and sing backup on a few new songs, I jumped at the honor. The band worked out of a fantastic barn studio with the expert ear and production skills of Ed Riemer. Tim Heap joins in on a track, and they were even able to collaborate remotely with their long-time keyboard player John Goetchius.
After they completed the recordings, we started throwing around ideas for the album artwork. Rum Bar Records would be releasing it on 7” vinyl, CD, and Digital.
We played with some concepts. Ultimately we agreed that our goal was to strike a balance between the nostalgia of the band’s storied history and the contemporary context of these new songs.
The final layout is a compositional hybrid of their previously released albums. We carried forward the classic logo created by Barry Hall, and stacked it above a white framed b&w photo. The album’s title is hand-lettered in sharpie (a nod toward the many setlists the band hastily penned over the years before hitting the stage).
BTW The cover photo is from series I took a while back when Peter pulled his legendary Fender Telly apart to try and find the date of manufacture.
The palette is inspired by the logo coloring on their album “Thayer Street”. The yellow background was an intentional strategy to grab the viewer’s attention. A primary consideration was the desire for a cover that would stand out among the many thumbnails vying for attention in the digital distribution landscape.
In a stroke of marketing genius, Rum Bar’s founder Lou Mansdorf partnered with Newbury Comics to release a limited edition of the EP in Yellow vinyl!
This partnership was a perfect synergy between a band and institution that have both been helping to make the Boston music scene “wicked good” for many years. The rollout included an in-store performance at the Norwood location.
The album is out now in the digital marketplace and the physical goods officially release on October 10th. The reception has been excellent so far.
“She’s The One is no run of the mill comeback. This thing’s a stone cold triumph!” – Faster and Louder
“It’s always renewing to hear a set like this at Newbury Comics. The store had the gorgeous yellow vinyl copy that sold a lot of copies during the day. Score that if you can.” – Boston Groupie News
“Throughout the band tears through each song with frantic, fun abandon…
Who knows what prompted this reunion, 33 years later, but it’s clear that they’ve managed to sand away any possible rust that may have settled in over the past several decades, offering a revisiting of a band that always deserved a much wider audience beyond their native Boston. She’s The One could very well be the release to make that happen.” – NeuFutur Magazine
The songs have been charting in the top 10 across a number of indie stations and the single “She’s the one” was #1 on Radio Indie Alliance top 40.
Topping it all off, many of the events mentioned above have been captured on video and may be part of a forthcoming documentary about The Dogmatics (stay tuned). I couldn’t be more excited about all this well-deserved attention the band is getting.
Give their new EP a listen, or try to catch them playing live.
by jydesign | Dec 1, 2013 | Blog
“In Gox We Trust” educating consumers on Bitcoin and other technologies
OK, I admit it, I wrote this primarily so I could write the caption above. Overall, I’m taking a neutral-to-skeptical view on Bitcoin. However, Tibanne Co.’s launch of Bitcoins.com as an attempt to popularize its adoption, is quite notable. Many publications have already covered this in detail. I’m more interested in what it represents for technology marketing.
Popularizing nascent “invisible” technologies
Source: Bitcoins.com
Educating the broader population, about brand new technologies that catch on after they incubate among ‘early adopters’, is no small feat. For technologists and marketers, there’s a lot to learn from these recent efforts. What’s challenging about platform-type technologies like Bitcoin or Twitter, just to name a few, is their ethereal quality. You can’t put a Bitcoin in your wallet.
I’ve been marketing software for many years, and I’ve always envied companies that create physical products. Apple can simply place a perfectly photographed iDevice on their homepage, and that’s almost all that’s needed to produce a pavlovian response in gadget lovers. Selling software and services requires different tactics, and I think we’ve yet to find a predictable framework for doing so. Mobility and expanding options in “channels” only increases the complexity (and opportunity) of this task.
Teaching to the Trend (more…)
by jydesign | Nov 24, 2013 | Blog
Optimize your pictures for best display within new Twitter image previews
Twitter has updated it’s various feeds (on the web, and in its mobile and desktop apps) to allow for displaying a partial preview of images. While the value of this is being debated by some, this particular article is aimed at folks who wish to take advantage of this new feature by optimizing the initial preview of their inline images.
Twitter inline images display as a landscape-oriented ‘preview’ of your attached picture right in the main feed, regardless of whether or not your full size image is in a landscape or portrait orientation. If you tap or click on an image, it ‘opens’ for viewing at full size. Twitter has confirmed that they are using a simple 2:1 fixed ratio to create uniform sized previews:
While they have shared the above details, I’ve yet to track down specifics regarding the vertical positioning of cropped images and if they are simply centered, or if their position is random. Test on various devices, so far, seem to point more to a random Y-axis positioning.
What does this mean for savvy Twitter marketers?
Well, if your followers are going to see these images, you may wish to control what appears within the initial preview area. If your goal is to present a coherent message right in the preview, without requiring a user to ‘open’ it to full view, you can simply produce horizontal artwork at the fixed 2:1 landscape ratio. This will ensure that any text copy, or significant aspects of your image, will appear immediately – and not get cropped out of view in the preview. Don’t assume that people will tap on your image preview to see the entire thing – if you have a written message to communicate, you are best off using a fixed-size picture at this ratio.
(more…)
by jydesign | Aug 5, 2013 | Blog
NOTE: I found this in my drafts from Aug 2012 and never finished it. But it’s just as relevant almost a year later.
Back in 2008 I wrote a blog post saying that Album Cover Designers were the The New Iconographers. Today, book cover designers are in the same boat thanks to eBooks. I heard an interview with Chip Kidd on WBUR that did a nice job of highlighting this issue. Here’s an insightful quote:
“…one of the lessons I learned in school is, you know, the whole point of a thumbnail drawing, a tiny little sketch, is that if something looks good small, if it’s effective small, it’s going to look great when it’s bigger. And the one thing I had to deal with – and this was way before e-books frankly – was the argument I don’t think this is going to look good when it’s tiny and on Amazon. People don’t buy a book on the web because of the cover. They’ll buy a book on the Web because they read a review or it’s word-of-mouth or, you know, some combination of the two, or they saw it on “Good Morning America” or what have you.”
Listen to the entire interview on Boston’s NPR station, WBUR…
