Ranking R.E.M. Album Covers Aesthetically 1982-2011
Ranking R.E.M. Album Covers
I was inspired by a friend’s Facebook thread about underrated late-period R.E.M. albums to create a ranking of the band’s album covers. Aesthetically. A ranking covering all their studio recordings from 1982 to their breakup in 2011.
The ranking doesn’t include compilations or live albums, although I am including Dead Letter Office because that one feels “of a piece” to me in spite of being assembled from various recordings for various purposes throughout the band’s first 5 years.
This ranking also does not focus on the quality of the albums themselves except where it is informed by and matched by the cover and how well those ends are served aesthetically. This is not an album ranking. This is an album cover ranking.
17. Around the Sun (2004)
Admit it, you kinda knew we were going to begin with this one. The artwork for their most-maligned album suffers for sins of association to be sure, but it’s also just kind of lazy work overall. At this point Stipe was taking the reins with the band’s visuals a bit tighter than maybe he should have. The photo, a blurry multiple-exposure shot of a single person (Stipe himself?) feels like off-the-rack stock photography and the typeface gains one point for being designed by Stipe himself and is immediately docked that point by looking a bit too ’90s four years into the new century. I’m one of this album’s defenders and even still I can’t make excuses for album art that looks as disinterested as the band themselves seemed at the time.
16. Reveal (2001)
As a designer you can often overlook failures in execution when you see good things in intention. That’s sorta how I feel about Reveal‘s art which gains in sum what it loses in parts. I like the lomography, I like the transparency effects, I like the flat 3D, and I am a huge fan of front cover track listings. And including the track times is a nice touch as well. Plus the color palette is fun saturated oranges and yellows befitting the (mostly) sunny sounds within. Still I feel like it just doesn’t gel as a whole. It feels awkward in an unintentional way that never seems to truly find its right footing. Not bad at all but suffers when I think of what might have been done with these same elements.
15. Up (1998)
As with Reveal, Up makes us look at the design’s intentions again. Some album art is meant to be taken as a whole, so that after you walk around through the inner sleeves a while you get a sense of the world the design is trying to create. Up is one of those album designs. Inner panels (and the supporting tour and merchandise) would reveal an affection for period clip art, from an era when that meant actual clipping with actual scissors. There’s lots of postal-looking packing art and cut and paste stamp art from vintage sources giving things a kind of late-1960’s office vibe. Unfortunately that deliberately cheap aesthetic stumbles a bit on the album cover proper. It seems like it needs something more to feel a bit more refined and considered than it does. Cheap was the look they were going for but this feels like it falls just a bit on the lazier end of cheap. The colors are perfect though. Up sounds like an aquarium abandoned in the woods that has since grown its own ecosystem and these blues and aquamarines nail that atmosphere perfectly.
14. Chronic Town (1982)
Oddities: Side A and B named “Chronic Town” and “Poster Torn” respectively.
Speaking of color palette informing content, whoever picked the specific blue for the overlay on the cover of their debut EP Chronic Town deserves a raise. They likely had little budget to work with here and the photo of gargoyle alone would have been fine on its own, if a bit more garage than the band deserved coming out of the gate. Add that blue overlay though and the entire thing becomes otherworldly. A perfect look for how odd and un-1982 the songs inside were. Perhaps it’s hindsight, but this cover always seemed to have the sturdy look of a band announcing itself confidently. No small feat considering how many postcards this same gargoyle likely appears on. This cover claims it as its own. Not the flashiest or most elaborate design in their catalog but iconic in a way that I’m sure must have been near-instant.
13. Accelerate (2008)
By 2008, R.E.M. were in comeback mode. It had only been 3 years and change since Around the Sun became their first widely-perceived mis-step in a two-decade-long run that made many wonder if the band would ever stumble. The band was re-invigorated from the not terribly enthusiastic response. They set out to regain footing, not spend as long on the recording and mixes, and come out of the gate swinging. While Accelerate fulfills that mission musically I can’t help feel looking at the cover that they were a bit rattled about just how to present it. The disconnect between the band logo, the album logo, and the art itself feels a bit scattered and schizophrenic and (for the first time) a bit more concerned with contemporary design trends than with partnering with the sounds inside. A bit too self-aware. I’m fond of a lot of what is going on here but it still feels like it exists separately from the album itself. Still, I respect the swing and for the most part this one hits where it should and perhaps the personality crisis is more of a perfect match than I realize.
12. Collapse Into Now (2011)
This one feels like it picks up and runs with a lot of the motifs first laid down by Up. Overlays of vintage print spirals, geometric patterns and blown out posterized photos. As always there are some subtextual elements hidden in plain sight (Stipe waving goodbye, the band deliberately obscuring their own photo in a nod to their famous disinterest in pop star poses) but for the most part this one is pretty straightforward and pleasing if a degree or two below-standard, if only because the band’s own visual standard was often so high.
11. Out of Time (1991)
This one hasn’t aged as well as my mind thought it would when I set out to make this list. One interesting facet: the typesetting on the ribbon. We’re so used to perfect type now that we don’t remember how accepting we used to be of imperfectly set type. In my mind’s eye, the “Out Of Time” is set more fluidly on the ribbon in spite of that not being the case in reality. That’s memory I guess: our brains tend to update detail. While its initially jarring to realize that that this is a photograph of a piece of multimedia artwork (Mike & Doug Starn’s Yellow Seascape with Film and Wood Blocks) it all works together really well, the browns and yellows and plastic gloss coming together to really nicely set the tone for the verdant springtime sounds inside. Theres a richness to it that feels simultaneously polished and handmade, just like the album itself. Frankly, I kinda prefer the crayon logo that graces the inner sleeve to the yellow one on the outer but what are ya gonna do? Still, this doesn’t look like any other album cover from anybody, let alone a multi-platinum smash hit and that’s real something.
10. Automatic for the People (1992)
The residue of early technology. Automatic for the People‘s cover is ever-so-slightly tripped up by the limitations of early photoshop filtering. Little did we know in fall of ’92 that those embossed side rails and that background digital texture would look so dated so rapidly. Who knows, maybe its charmingly retro now to younger eyes? At any rate the real star here is the brutally washed out, almost chiaroscuro photo of the vintage motel signage star and it holds up brilliantly. Framed with a tasteful sanserif (DIN 1451 I believe) that knows its place but has a soft-pedaled dignity that elevates the overall piece. The star displays a beautiful decay absolutely in line with the somber, sober, reflective songs inside. If only they hadn’t had access to an early version of Photoshop this one might have eked closer to the top 5.
9. Dead Letter Office (1987)
Oddities: Sides A and B dubbed “Post Side” and “Script Side” respectively, the pseudo-band photos.
B-sides collections are always kind of fan-only items. Cash-ins aimed at completists. Peter Buck writes as much in the liner notes to their 1987 “oddities collared” album Dead Letter Office, but you’d never know it from the richness of the packaging. Everything here works, whether by design or not. The color blocks of green crayon, the dino chalk drawings, the band logo rendered fittingly for an “odds and sods” collection as spiky mutant beast. Even the back cover, featuring individual band member photos that were anything but, the DLE artwork has a mix of mystique and fun that was trademark in the band’s 1980’s IRS years.
8. New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996)
If some covers haven’t aged as well as one would hope, this one has matured perfectly. I wasn’t in love with this one on its release. Having known the album title for a month before seeing it my mind had conjured something more dynamic, more colorful, more explosive. After all the word “Adventures” is part of the title. Fortunately with time this Stipe image taken out of the window during a drive through the desert (the quiet type knowing its precise place, ala Automatic) now seems perfectly suited to the band’s first real “road album”, recorded at various cities the previous year while on a massive world tour for their behemoth 1994 album Monster. A simple black and white image of a passing landscape gets at all that in a way that manages to be both suggestive and encompassing.
7. Fables of the Reconstruction (of the) (1985)
Oddities: Owning to the alternate titles, the LP spine featured “Fables of the” one way and “Reconstruction of the” upside down on the opposite end. Liner notes featured word puzzles to match personnel to duties. Sides A and B are listed as “A Side ” and “Another Side” respectively.
Younger readers who grew up on “Everybody Hurts” (or later even) may not realize it, but at one time R.E.M. was weird. Odd, angular, arty, fussy, and completely unwilling to contort themselves to fit pop music conventions. Hell, their first video compilation was titled Succumbs, with tongue firmly in cheek. Between gauzy music videos of abstract Super 8 footage of freight trains pulling into and leaving stations, Stipe constantly toying with his public image (this tour would see him shaving a bald monk’s spot on his head) and delivering odd folk soliloquies between songs, and artsy, cryptic visuals hidden in their album and even their 7″ single covers, R.E.M. in the mid-80s were a strange creature, on purpose. Perhaps nowhere more so then on 1985’s Fables. Not only does the album feature a cyclical title (readable as Fables of the Reconstruction or Reconstruction of the Fables with an extra “of the” to bring you back round again) but it also essentially features two covers to suit this concept. Sprawled over front and back 9or back and front) are weird sculptures, sponge-dab paintings of prosceniums, individual band photos projected over with ocean life…its all very psychedelic without falling into any of the tired tropes often associated with psychedelic design. There was a (to employ an oft-used cliche about this record) southern gothic flavor to this folk-psychedelia. And it only got weirder inside, with woodcuts of fractured architecture and stacks of a variety of antiquarian typefaces spelling out mysterious liner notes and song titles, some of which were for songs that wouldn’t even appear on the album.
A weird design for a weird record of a weird band in a weird period. Excellent.
6. Reckoning (1984)
Oddities: Spine features the words “File Under Water”
A left-turn from Murmur‘s more reserved cover from the previous year, the cover for 1984’s Reckoning was seen by some as a mis-step at a time that the band was fast becoming a critical darling. For them to have won Album of the Year from Rolling Stone only to follow-up with something this deliberately messy made some wonder if Reckoning‘s cover painting betrayed a sophomore slump within. Of course as left-turns build up over the longer tail of a body of work they create a tapestry of smart, knowing strategies not often visible at the time and this cover was definitely one of those. The band hired local outsider artist Rev. Howard Finster to create this primitive serpentine painting detailed with song lyrics and scratched-in figures and faces and the result is an almost religious-looking cover that declared its independence from timely packaging tropes just as the band themselves were doing the same with pop conventions at the time. It builds on the mystery they were busy forging and shooting out new paths from it.
5. Murmur (1983)
A sophisticated piece of design from a band that seemed to appear fully-formed out of nowhere. In the internet age, a band coming from a small town in Georgia to ever-increasing notoriety doesn’t seem so strange, but in 1983 smack in the middle of the old guard music industry it wasn’t all that common. Lots of bands at the first sign of success would have packed up and moved to NY or LA (as several bands from Athens, GA did before them.) By staying put, R.E.M. demanded the world deal with them on their own terms. So when their debut arrived feeling so confident and complete it definitely garnered its share of attention. The creeping kudzu vines that star on the Murmur cover coupled with the dreamy haze of the photography and the masked ghostly type fit perfectly the strange new sounds on the record. Simultaneously fresh and timeless, smart and naive. It’s hard to look at this cover and not feel the specific humidity and atmosphere of those songs.
4. Monster (1994)
It’s pop-art, it’s packaging, it’s saturated (in more ways that one), it’s perfect. Not only is this packaging, but it’s an image of ephemera as ephemera. For a band coming off two albums of pastoral chamber pop and looking to (as Stipe put it at the time) make “a Banana Splits record”, Monster’s cover image of a bear face on a children’s balloon is graphically-impactful enough to be a pop smash and subtextual enough to communicate a band winking about it from the inside. For the first time ever on an album they even embrace Helvetica, in its bold oblique variation. This is them accepting superstardom on their own terms and communicating that disposability via pop art inoculation.
3. Green (1988)
Oddities: The R’s on the front cover were overlaid with varnish-spot printed 4’s, a motif that repeats on the back cover track listing with track “O4” listed as “OR”. Sides A and B dubbed “Air Side” and “Metal Side” respectively.
Ferns filtered to become a graphic representation of Nature itself, printed on matte recycled paper (a big deal in 1988) with a type stack that is both statuesque and civil (in the government document sense) create a pitch-perfect representation of where the band was at at the end of the 1980s. Environmental activism was topical again and it would find itself threaded into several of the songs on Green as well as in their live show that tour: in the merch, in the lobby at booths set up to educate attendees about ecological concerns. Theres even that great centered white stamp of columns and trees that anchors the composition at the bottom. There’s a weight and a gravitas to this cover that grounds the record inside yet gives it a kind of serious heft. Plus the initial run had overprinted 4’s over the R’s for reasons never fully explained, which is so mysteriously cool that I hope I never learn why they did it.
2. Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)
Oddities: A number of them. The spine lists the album’s title as “L Rich P”, the back cover track listing is in the wrong order while also not seeming to attempt a correct order, each song is supplemented with a bit of supporting text to either clarify or obfuscate it, all kinds of strange liner notes about local attractions and such.
My favorite era and almost my favorite cover. Many times the past 25 years I’ve pored over this one and tried to decipher it. Obviously you have Bill Berry and the buffalo and the infamous missing apostrophe, but…chains? What are these smudges and streaks? Eh, who knows. It all adds to the intrigue. Another otherworldly facet to a band working at the height of their mystique. This cover is the main reason I don’t hate Copperplate Gothic as much as most do. Here it feels like the tone of voice of whatever strange version of Americana they were up to at the time. It manages to tether things no matter how odd they get (and LRP goes some odd places indeed) to a kind of American history distorted through the specific lens of this record. Throughout there’s a wealth of quirky details and liner notes and altogether strange elements that succeed in building R.E.M.’s world apart from the mainstream.
1. Document (1987)
Oddities: Of course the album numbering convention “REM No. 5”, the spine telling you to “File Under Fire”, the two album sides dubbed “Leaf” and “Page” respectively.
Of course. This is where I came in. I wrote a lengthy blog piece about this one igniting my love affair with typography back when I was 13 and I doubt I’ll have much to add here that I didn’t say there but man does this one stand up tall. Much like Vaughan Oliver‘s essential work on Pixies’ Doolittle, this is one that looked cool on Day One, Day One Hundred, and cool whatever day we’re on now (looked it up: this is Day 11021). Its strange, its cool, it’s fractured, it’s defined, it tells a story and it also just works as impactful cover. The numbers, the categorization, the New Deal-era stadium rock vibe comes across with clarity and a touch of their trademark mystery lest things get too dry. Just a fantastic cover and my personal favorite.
On having several of my posters featured in the Irish TV show Eipic
In the summer of 2015, I received an email out of the blue from a production company in Ireland working on a 6-part TV series about “a creative bunch of teenagers who get together to start a band. The group embark on a journey out of their rural town and onto a national stage.” It would feature gritty realism mixed with hyperreal musical interludes.
Behold! The trailer…
They had found my work on the now-defunct gigposters.com (RIP) and had attached a low-res thumbnail of my Bombay Bicycle Club poster and asked if I’d be willing to offer clearance to use it as set dressing. Of course I was thrilled at the opportunity to showcase some of my work so I agreed and they passed me on to the show’s art director Francis.
Francis sent over a list of other posters they might be interested in and requested I send over jpegs that could be blown up and used as background art. It seemed strange to me that a bunch of Irish teenagers would have been present at so many shows in the Sacramento area a decade ago, but it sounded like a fun project to be associated with and no one would be able to make out the fine print on the posters anyway.
So I shipped off a raft of jpegs and hoped for the best. The following spring the show aired on Ireland’s TG4 channel and I was absolutely floored at not only how many posters they were able to use, but how large they made many of them. 11×17’s increasing to 2 and 3 times that size. I was all over this show, in the background anyway. It was a real treat every week that winter opening up TG4’s webplayer and scanning through each new episode looking for my posters. Eventually I actually gave the show a proper watch too, and it’s really not bad. An interesting mix of music and dramedy. You can check the show out for yourself at TG4’s site for the show and below I’ve got some screengrabs of scenes featuring my stuff.
- Violent Femmes, Empire – Sacramento (2005), 2. Drive-By Truckers, Empire – Sacramento (2008), 3. Gossip, Harlow’s – Sacramento (2006)
- Drive-By Truckers – Empire – Sacramento (2008), 2. Queens of the Stone Age – Empire – Sacramento (2005), 3. Lateef the Truthspeaker – Harlows – Sacramento (2005),
- Cut Copy/Foals – Granada – Dallas (2011)
- Liam O’Maonlai – LLC – Grand Rapids (2006), 2. Bombay Bicycle Club – Assembly – Sacramento (2013)
The Aesthetic of R.E.M. Album Covers: Our Band Could Be Your Typography Lesson
13, Broke, Curious, Bored
The moment is indelibly burnt into my memory.
Every Sunday morning, I’d pick through the day’s edition of the Omaha World Herald, digging through sooty inserts and box store circulars to more or less fixate on the comics, entertainment section, the ads.
What I ultimately was after were the record store flyouts: rows and rows of colorful thumbnails of exciting-looking records I had no money to buy. If I was lucky my uncle would pick up a copy of something I wanted to hear and I’d be able to make a dub off his. At the time, I didn’t really live within walking distance of a record store and I had two holidays a year where I might get gifted music and those were spread out perfectly 6 months apart. So for me, the sunday Musicland ad was my version of window shopping.
This must have been autumn of 1987 because there it was: R.E.M.’s Document, their top 10 breakthrough album after years spent toiling in the underground. The cover design was sharp and arty and completely oblique. It was an intriguing image even at 1.5 inches square: no band photo, fractured black and white abstract image, and there in the corner was it’s coup d’grace: a stamped icon that read “R.E.M. No. 5.” They had actually taken the bold step of numbering the album as one in a sequence. I cant describe how brilliant that seemed the first time I saw it. When you’re that young, every even mildly innovative idea you come across seems like a lightning bolt. Everything is new to you so when something sets itself in stark relief to other things like it its as if you discovered the genius of it all on your own. After all, everything is effetely happening for the very first time. To me the cover was a bold statement that managed to straddle both art and pop culture and thus it absolutely imprinted on me. But alas, I had no money so it would be another 18 months before I’d even hear the record for the first time.
Musicland Ad featuing a tiny, inscrutable thumbnail of R.E.M.’s Document cover art
Not the Musicland ad but a trade ad from the same period I swiped from eBay.
I was fortunate to have an aunt and uncle only a couple years older than me and that opened up my world to live music. Officially my first concert was The Monkees’ 20th Anniversary Tour at the Douglas County Fair in August 1986 and I almost feel like this should count since in spite of it being a county fair it occurred during the height of MTV-stoked Monkeemania 2.0 and it was an endless sea of people as a result.
If Im being stricter about it, my first real concert experience was INXS on the Kick tour in June 1988 (opener: Steel Pulse). Having little-to-no allowance and few concert options in Omaha (let alone ones my parents would agree to let me attend, even with my aunt and uncle as de facto chaperones) the idea of attending a concert, any concert at all became more than enough the point. I was hooked. I could probably have enjoyed any show you dropped me off at around that time, regardless of band or genre. I wanted to attend more shows. Badly.
Fast forward to the next spring. Bon Jovi was touring their New Jersey album and a stop in Omaha was slated. I gave my uncle the last $20 from my Christmas money and hoped for the best, reason being this was the pre-Ticketmaster era where you had to physically call record stores to find out which seats they had in stock from which rows and then hope you could drive over there before someone else beat you to them. I was hardly the world’s biggest Bon Jovi fan but that didn’t really matter. This was a Concert. And a big one at that. That’s what mattered.
A week or so later, my uncle calls me after school and says, “we’re thinking about doing R.E.M. instead. What do you think?”
I pretended to seriously deliberate on this for a moment long enough to make it seem like I was a wizened music snob before replying “sure, let’s do that.” I knew that I loved that cover and I knew that at my Jr. High dances “End of the World As We Know It” would blow the floor up into a rager in that crucial last half hour. And again, most importantly this was a concert. And it would also be a big one, if not quite as bombastic as what Bon Jovi had in mind. Little did I know how completely different my life would have been if we’d just settled on the Bon Jovi show instead.
March 10, 1989
R.E.M. Civic Auditorium Arena. Omaha, Nebraska. Literally everything changes. Forever.
I’m certain that everybody has that one show that sets the metrics for what every show they see forever after can and should be, and I was incredibly fortunate that this was mine. As an awkward, dorky kid with artistic leanings, I had an inkling that I wanted something more from music but for the most part the furthest I’d been to the fringes was mildly-left-of-the-dial mid-80s Top 40 like INXS, OMD, etc. My tastes hadn’t even developed to the point that I knew there was any room to expand on them. One night in March and all that changes. Right up front you knew that you were seeing another animal entirely. Rather than doing rote audience greetings, they used massive onstage projections to subvert those tropes, for instance minimal white text on black declaring “It’s great to be in (insert the name of your town here).” It was at once showbiz and abstract. Nowdays this isn’t such a strange thing as LED walls and computer graphics allow even the smallest acts to turn their shows into multi-media experiences, but in 1989 this was both a callback to Fillmore West-style psychedelia and a step forward into a more alternative conception of what the live experience could be. Great, blown out abstracted reels would flood the stage with light, unplanned intersections of music and image nudging and colliding sparking happy accidental moments. It was as random as a Pink Floyd show was choreographed and that made all the difference.Where the performance had a whirling careening quality (flush I suppose with the confidence of having already stacked 6 classic albums 8 years into your career) it was also the most structured thing the band had done to date. I’d hear lifers around this time complain (as they always do) that the band had lost the magically oblique sense that “anything could happen” that was a product of the mystique they’d nurtured during their IRS years and the natural result of a band becoming too big to truly belong to anyone on a personal level anymore.
R.E.M. Green World Tour backstage pass reflecting the album cover art and showing how structured their aesthetic had become
While their albums up to that time usually had established visual motifs that would cascade through their singles sleeves, merch, etc, Green was the first time there seemed to be a strict and established design system undergirding all the album’s materials. Maybe moving to Warners gave them greater resources in the packaging department, greater control, maybe they finally had a record that they felt was a cohesive enough statement to bring that uniformity of design into the fold, maybe Stipe was just really enamored of Robert Wiebking’s Venus SB Bold Extended typeface and was keen to work it in everywhere he could. It didn’t really matter. I was at the age where I was starting to understand the album as Complete Artistic Statement and seeing this carried through in their aesthetic was absolutely crucial to that end.
Venus SB Extended. The first typeface I ever learned and for a while my conception of the platonic ideal typeface. I learned to draw every character of this typeface and know it like the back of my hand as a result.
R.E.M.’s 1989 album Green and it’s singles. Note how all but the final single “Pop Song ’89″adhere to a strict typographic style.
Drawing Alphabets, Illegitimate “R”s,
and Remembering Things Wrong
So with the doors to a whole new world thrown open to me I now have so much to discover and I cant wait to get started. Unfortunately I still don’t have any money, necessary in 1989 if Im going to follow this obsession to see where it goes. I would walk a half hour from home to Homer’s Records in a ShopKo -anchored strip mall and spend hours staring at (sigh, dating myself pretty hard here) CD longboxes and absorbing as much detail as I could so that it would hold in my head long enough for me to get home and try to recreate elements of the designs with my pens and markers. This of course led to a lot of things bleeding together in my mind: the trestle from the back cover of Murmur melded with the Victorian buildings which bracketed the back cover tracklist of Fables, the scratchy odds-and-sods shaggy dog look of Dead Letter Office and the outsider art scrawl of the Reverend Howard Finster’s cover painting for Reckoning.
Promotional artwork for R.E.M.’s 1985 album Fables of the Reconstruction, featuring its playful “anything goes” stack of antique typefaces
More than anything I was taken aback by their use of type. Every album had its own distinct fontstack ranging from strictly regimented (Lifes Rich Pageant’s signature use of Copperplate – one of the reasons I continue to cut that much-maligned typeface more slack than most) to kitchen sink (Fables’ “anything goes after midnight in the typesetters shop” stable of beautifully clashing vintage typefaces). Staring at these covers and poring over their secrets, injokes and coded hints (which IRS-era R.E.M. threaded through all their covers, even throwaway items like radio promo singles would have theme-reinforcing messages on their spines. See: “Finest Worksong”‘s “WANT” and “NEED” on opposite ends of its spine.) I spent a lot of time looking for underlying structure, of commonalities within the visuals.
One thing that stood out to me straightway was the lack of what I would come to call “illegitimate Rs”, or capital Rs where the leg on the right hand side was straight rather than curved. With few exceptions (the R with the curved leg gracing their debut Murmur) R.E.M. steered clear of these lesser Rs. Something about this really stuck with me. It was probably nothing but to a kid under the spell of a deliberately mysterious band it had to mean something. It was more serious, artier, more structurally sound. It had to be, right? This seems like a small detail but for a 14-year-old budding typographic enthusiast, this was everything. It was easily the gateway drug into my typeface addiction and the yardstick by which I would measure other typefaces as I learned to identify them.
Tee shirt for R.E.M.’s 1986 “Pageantry” tour in support of their breakthrough album Lives Rich Pageant. I wore this too many times as a kid. It also contains a perfect example of what I would dub a “legitimate R”
It’s also important to remember that this was 1989. Desktop publishing was in at best its infancy and I was a working class kid. If I wanted to experiment with type I had 2 options: I could scavenge the back walls of craft stores for whatever sets of LetraSet type decals they had in stock (and those were always slim pickins) and the photocopier at the public library in my neighborhood. This worked well enough for a while but I wanted more control. To get it I was going to have to learn to draw entire alphabets. I would use my record covers to divine what a full alphabet of a certain typeface might look like. So long as I had an uppercase R and an uppercase M, I could generally extrapolate from there what the rest of the font would look like. I spent hours sitting on my couch with a ruler and a mechanical pencil making single letters 6 inches tall in my sketchbook. I had to make them large so that shrinking them down (one of the few features the library’s photocopier offered) would forgive any imperfections in my line work. I killed countless brain cells inhaling fumes from endless black markers used to ink all the characters. It was tedious work but I was obsessed: I wanted access to the same tools print designers had even if I had to fake nearly all of my way there.
Letraset Rub-On Decal Type. Essential in the pre-desktop publishing era.
To make matters worse, I didn’t even have money to get the records I needed to base my fonts off of. I had to stare, study, mentally photograph, return home, and get to my sketchbook and begin work. And on top of that, if the record wasn’t in stock I would have to wait until the next time I saw my uncle and stare at the tiny thumbnail images of the band’s discography on the inner sleeve of the band’s IRS hits collection Eponymous. In a way this became more of a blessing than curse as those miniscule reproductions took things that were already mysterious and lacquered them with an extra layer of impossible mystique. I was both seeing things wrong and remembering them wrong and that caused my creativity to fill in the blanks to create something else entirely. It would be another year and a half before I would discover that the cover of Fables wasn’t an eroded abstract painting. For better or worse, my near-total lack of resources was fueling my shoestring design education.
The following summer, I received Tony Fletcher’s Remarks: The Story of R.E.M. as a birthday present. Aside from it being the band’s first published biography, spanning the Oconee Street church to the end of the 1989 world tour, it also featured a photo glossary of the band’s LPs and singles up to that point, and this time they were all in full color. I had more fuel for my inspiration. That summer I spent countless hours making custom cassette J-cards for mixtapes and album copies, spec tee shirt mockups and of course alternate cover art for albums and singles. I was using the band’s own art to create a kind of visual fanfiction. This was how I learned to follow stylistic cues and design to theme. And it was all happening on remaindered art room paper scraps and sketchbooks when I could afford them.
Needless to say, it was Green’s Venus that was my first foray into drawing my own type. It was at the time my favorite typeface (and one of the reasons I keep ITC’s Blair face close to my deck even today) and since there were long stretches of straight block line it was a good one to start with. After a while the curves weren’t even that much of a hassle, my hand control reaching post-chore Daniel-san heights of zen accuracy. Eventually I would loosen up a bit and drop the asceticism of the “legitimate” R’s, as even the band eventually would, kitting 1994’s Monster out in simple Helvetica Bold Oblique.
Other typefaces would follow, particularly once the Émigré-spurred custom font revolution of the early 90s kicked in. With bizarre type and grunge styles coming into vogue it became easier to hide the handmade abnormalities of my homemade type within the quirks of these faces.
Sadly, I never really kept copies of those early typefaces. You go off to art school, you move, you move again, that stuff gets scattered. But the lessons I learned over what must have been hundreds of hours hand-drawing type have stayed with me throughout my life and my career as a designer, and are almost-certainly the reason that every poster I design begins with color and type.
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