No Allegiances has been asked to serve as UI design consultant to Playlouder for their revolutionary ISP-based file sharing service. Details are hush but in effect users pay the ISP a monthly fee on top of their standard plan in exchange for unlimited music downloads which stay within the network. The revenue from the monthly fee is then shared amongst the repertoire owners, making everybody happy and introducing a new model of music distribution and culminating with everyone holding hands, singing (properly licensed and paid for) songs and dancing on the corroding corpse of The Man.

As everything is in progress there’s not much to show except for these pretty pixel people living in their perfect pixel world where music is shared freely (but where the artists and labels are still remitted fairly for it).

Further updates as they come. Playlouder logo designed by Stylorouge

One of my favourite bands Thursday ran a T-shirt design comp towards the end of 2007. I submitted a couple of designs and while this one didn’t make the cut (the one that made it to the shortlist was this) I received an e-mail from their management asking if they could use it.

“Fuck yes”, was the reply. I don’t think they’ve printed it yet, I’m not sure if they ever will, but I’m just chuffed as all hell that they were even close to using this for merch.

This design made the shortlist for a merch contest that Thursday held last year.

It ended up coming in fourth but a few weeks after the competition ended Thursday’s management contacted me and asked to use this design in an upcoming range. As per the Heart design it’s not seen the back of a sweaty meathead in a moshpit yet but I hold hope.

A tour poster designed for the Brighton based five-piecer Ghost of a Thousand done for BIMM Bristol. It’s a fucking Cerberus, yo.

Ghost of a Thousand have been together since 2004 and fly a bruised and battered flag for ballsy British hardcore. They’ve shared the stage with Gallows, Poison the Well and are a must see live. Get your ears shredded here.

A bit of a story here. Stylorouge was invited by Parlophone to pitch for Paul McCartney’s thirteenth studio album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

Whilst not involved with this project from the beginning—the creative on the ‘Fine Line’ single was done by James Cooper and Mark Higenbottam based around Brian Clarke’s line art—I took it on when Rob, the creative director at Stylorouge fell ill.

After an all-nighter, the boards were ready for Rob to take to his meeting with Paul. As I was leaving the office to get a fry-up and some sleep I got a call from his wife Jane saying that he had been taken ill.

When the rest of the troops rolled in crisis talks dictated that with James being in Amsterdam pursuing his music career and me being closest to the project I would do the presentation. At this stage I was too delirious to realise the enormity of it but in hindsight—having the biggest job your studio has seen in months riding on your presentation is daunting, but having to do that in front of one of the forefathers of modern British music on absolutely zero sleep—I should have been packing it.

The only thing I was worried about was not having had a shower and still wearing the only clean thing in my laundry and having gone out the night before the night before in it. I managed to stop by a Tesco’s on the way to MPL to pick up a can of deodorant before going into the meeting.

To kill the waffle, the meeting went well and Paul approved all the visuals on the spot.

Rob had proposed that we run an old photograph of Paul for the cover as Chaos and Creation we were told was largely a reflective album. This also solved the tricky situation that we didn’t have any recent photographs of Paul to use on the artwork.

The idea of “reflection” also led to the jewel case tray being lined with a sheet of reflective gold foil. These trays caused problems in America because it was setting off alarms in stores that had magnetic theft protection systems. Only when you’re working for an ex-Beatle can you get away with things like that.

Rob’s idea for a “Paul McCartney” ambigram was also a reference to the idea of reflection, albeit somewhat loosely as an ambigram is less a reflection than it is a rotation of a word. The ambigram was what took the longest time on the design and it was after working on it for days the combination of the “CART” of Cartney was achieved. There’s a discussion on Typophile about this, and I agree with the criticisms levelled at it.

Given the opportunity to draw it again I can see where things could have been improved but I did use what I learnt drawing this for a shirt in Schwipe’s Eyes Don’t Lie range.

The booklet was illustrated with line-drawings by Brian Clarke of Paul’s hands and features.

The cover being a photograph was printed on satin stock and the inside pages on uncoated. I was later told that all these factors—gold blocking on the o-card, the gold inlay and two-tone stock made it one of the most expensive releases in Parlophone’s history. Burn.