Peter Saville, the house designer for Factory Records (Joy Division, New Order, etc.), said that his mantra for album design is to "Make it better".
On this panel we will hear from current album designers about their work and their approach in the 21st century to designing the album and beyond.
Founding partners of Post Typography, Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen, have collaborated on design, art, and music projects for more than twelve years, beginning with hand-printed concert posters and progressing to higher profile design and illustration projects for clients such as The New York Times, U.S. Green Building Council, John Legend & The Roots, and Random House. Strals and Willen are authors of Lettering & Type, a book on lettering and typeface design, published by Princeton Architectural Press, and they currently teach classes in design and typography at the Maryland Institute College of Art. They have lectured at the Cooper Union, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and Harvard University among others, and have contributed to the Baltimore music scene for many years (most notably with the influential punk band Double Dagger).
Jacob Speis is an in house designer at Relapse Records. Relapse Records is based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA, Relapse Records is world-renowned for its diversity and dedication to decidedly left-of-center music. Relapse sidesteps the trends of the day. In the fourteen years since the label's inception, Relapse has established itself as a fan's label - one that combines an enthusiasm for providing extreme music fans with the highest quality, most well-packaged releases with a forward-thinking musical foresight.
Terence Hannum is a visual artist and musician who has used cassette tape in his music (Solo and with the band LOCRIAN) and now as his material and subject in his visual art. He has an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches Art Foundations at Stevenson University outside Baltimore.
