we’re are thrilled to announce that our record sleeve for polinski’s debut album labyrinths has won a color in design award. this is the first time we’ve ever won an award for any print work we’ve produced. quite a thing.

winners will apparently be featured in HOW magazine (july issue), and PRINT magazine (august issue) as well as their websites, the pantone website, and celebrated in a newly created online color in design collection, appearing in later summer.

a huge thank you once again to kim at monotreme records for producing the project, to branislav cirkovic for his fantastic typography, and of course to our long-time friend and collaborator paul wolinski for making the incredible music that inspired it all. to commemorate the occasion – below is a previously unreleased digital copy of the poster we produced for the cd + vinyl versions of the release.

in other polinski news, we’re hard at work on visuals for the forthcoming future everything show in manchester england next month. stay tuned.

my latest IFP article is a call to arms to designers and those employing them, to raise the standard in terms of what is aesthetically acceptable. it’s very easy to dismiss the need for a good looking visual design, when money is short and the immediate gains are negligible. the article strives to point out however that the long-term affects of these decisions can be quite damaging, both psychologically and sociologically. here’s an excerpt from the piece -

“to reiterate once and for all, it’s our responsibility as human beings to remember there’s a lot of people on the planet who have no control over the look of the world around them and who are ruled by those who want to ‘make a buck’. those of us that must suffer living beneath billboards towering above, promising soulless dreams, the garishly coloured junk food wrappers sitting in the gutter, the television commercials selling drugs for pains that don’t exist, the dying buildings built with cheap materials slumping under the weight of their own short lives, the angry faces and the lack of respect for anything. these people aren’t idiots. they know better than anyone that the look of the world around them massively affects their subconscious state of mind. they know it when they walk out of their rotting front door, glance at the grey sky, the paint peeling from the walls of their neighbour’s house across the street, scrape the ice from their car’s windshield with the splintering lid of a margarine tub, curse as the car won’t start and their foot goes through the rusted bottom of it as they lash out in anger. they know it when some of them later get drunk and walk around smashing windows, keying car doors, spray-painting church walls, and beating people up – all scenes I’ve witnessed in my years growing up in england in the suburbs of cambridge, 3 years at university in manchester and later living in bedford-stuyvesant in new york city. It’s a level of rage that I can support and forgive when places like that are your reality. try getting mugged at 8:30am on your way to work, as i was in 2008, and being told by the cops that there’s no point in reporting it.

some of these people hate the world around them. they know what the end-game is better than the thoughtless assholes who make the products, create the ads for them and leave those ads gathering mould on some rusted old bus-stop sign, 23 stops out of town in some relentless nightmare of a burnt out suburb. the sorts of places that otherwise only filmmakers dare frequent in order to make their gritty melodramas. we have got to remember that every small gesture toward making things simply functional, that disregards how much ‘greyer’ you are making the user’s day, is a very valid negative point.”

you can read the rest of the article here.

needless to say but there are more in the works, for some pretty cool projects too. stay tuned.

in july of 2011 i was staying in los angeles with some friends, needing some time out from everything. the one thing i had on my plate during my stay out there in the breezy dry heat, was a pitch document for a job we’d been put forward for by some collaborators of ours.

the job was to revamp the carbon war room website. the carbon war room is a non-profit organization set up by richard branson for the facilitation and realization of investment in sustainable low-emissions industries and technologies. in other words, an enterprise setup to help investors and entrepreneurs realize the financial benefits of ‘going green’ on a vast scale in today’s market.

version industries’ MO from the outset has been to fight to work for clients that we believe have something worthwhile to say or offer the world. this job was consequently very attractive to us as we knew we’d be able to put a good deal of work into helping, even in some immeasurably small capacity, to change the state of the world today.

the trick of course was that we were pitching against 6 other companies for the job, a good deal of whom already worked in the environmental sector or were already working for the carbon war room in some capacity. furthermore we’d never done a website of this kind before. this is something that always lets us down initially with new clients, as if we actually have never done any website before. by which we mean that we try with every job to do something entirely different every time. so the odds were against us, plus i was sort of on holiday and back in the new york studio everyone had 100 other pressing issues to attend to.

i talked it through with giles over the phone and we came up with a plan. he produced the words to describe our approach to this, and i sat down and started drawing some pictures, so to speak. the understanding we had of how best to handle this project (and as it turned out, this would be our advantage over everyone else competing) was that we needed to make this site engaging (they were getting horrid bounce-rates), less business-like (the current site felt like it was for some london law-firm, with ‘small print’ everywhere) and more enjoyable on the various new computing platforms out there (i.e. let’s make it big, fun, easy to scroll and hit buttons with your fingers on an ipad). for a company trying to offer a fresh approach to tackling the world’s major environmental concerns, their problems seemed clear to us in terms of design.

the key element we were shooting for in our pitch was something that later became known as the engagement component. this was very simple a colorful, quick, javascript driven tool that determined what type of person you the user were. it would then direct you to the part of the site that was relevant to you, explaining what the site had to offer to you, in your own terms.

the other elements we were suggesting in our pitch were conveyed by a series of quick mock-ups of our vision for the site using large format photography, a very spacious design and bold use of typography.

we packaged the whole thing up and sent it off. i went back into the sun with a sense that overall we possibly could have done better, but not sure how. it was just that feeling you have when you’re in someone else’s house in another part of the world, and you don’t quite have the same focus as you do when you’re in your own studio.

a week or so later were informed we were in the next round and that we’d caught their attention. a few weeks later, after some further interviews we were told we’d been selected to do the job. it was the first of a few radical changes for our company around this time, and was deeply affecting our general outlook. after almost 10 years of being around we were now getting the work we felt we were always made for. this meant of course that in return we had to thank them for doing so. we had to thank them in the only way we knew how – by doing the best job we could.

it was a vast task, encompassing initially a large main website completely integrated with their already blooming business forums on linkedin, and a smaller subsidiary site for one of the their latest active operations, renewable jet fuels. there were many meetings with a great deal of back and forth over the various approaches we should take. a lot of new ideas were developed in this time that went beyond our initial pitch. the filter we provided, as they were so fond of saying in meetings, was to give their content a rock ‘n’ roll feel. not to be taken literally of course, but it simply meant we needed to make this attractive to people like us as well as people like them. this included providing infographics throughout the site with a certain wide-eyed, humorous and naïve aesthetic -

and making the home page of renewablejetfuels.org look a little like the interior of an airplane -

one of the final elements to fall into place was their ubiquitous sonar. they wanted us to translate their company logo and how it represented a map of the carbon war room’s various facilities into an interactive site navigation tool. this is the kind of thing we rarely get to do, and is always a pleasure. it involved sitting around, arguing the difference between ‘what would be cool’ and ‘what would annoy the hell out of people’ and finding some middle ground therein. you can see the results of this if you click on the company logo when you first hit the site.

it’s not often you get paid to make a difference. often you just have to do that kind of thing for free. embrace it when you get the chance. we’d like to extend a huge amount of thanks to mark grundy, david schwartz, peter boyd and the rest of the carbon war room team who made this project such a great pleasure to work on. there is of course more work yet to do, but right now seemed like an appropriate time to raise a glass to the experience.

cheers,

i’ve just handed in my latest article for the IFP. in essence it’s a piece that questions how easy it is to assess the quality of a film (or any work of art) in an age where hype is everything. the article starts out with a proposed set of rules and then attempts to qualify them. these rules are as follows -

rule 1. (to kill expectation)

go into the film without having read or watched anything. trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

rule 2. (to kill projection)

assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what kind of movie it is trying to be. do not project your own expectations. let the film dictate the level of expectation, be that tonally, narratively or conceptually.

then, assess how well you think the film reaches whatever goals it set out to achieve.

rule 3. (to kill hype)

don’t talk about the film with anyone who has not seen it, except if you’re encouraging them to go see it. only discuss the film with those that have seen it, and discuss it hard. that’s what it’s there for.

you can read the rest of the article here.

we’d like to thank gus mantel for allowing us to use his incredible animated gifs to illustrate the piece. you can view more of his work here.

the first time the work of louis CK really hit our radar was when we heard him ask the former US secretary of defense donald rumsfeld, live on US radio, if he was a lizard. it was a question he’d put forward just moments after suggesting that collectively rumsfeld and dick cheney (former US vice-president) were in fact lizards from outer space that eat human flesh. of course we had been casual fans before of louis’s work before, but it was this delicious moment that really turned our heads – the reason being that it reminded us hugely of the late great bill hicks, whose work has had a massive influence on our work at version industries.

we first met louis backstage at one of his recent shows in new york – the very same shows that became his most recent special, live at the beacon theater, which we have since been put in charge of releasing online. it was the gregory brothers who had recommended us for the job and after some initial phone calls and emails with louis’s management, we soon found ourselves sitting on couches opposite louis backstage at the beacon theater. louis was very clear on how he wanted to go about things and we initially served as a sounding board for his various ideas. we explained what each of his suggested directions would entail and what limitations, if any, he might face. he then told us that he was about to go on national television and not just announce the project, but also give the date it was to go live. there was not a second to lose.

in terms of design, it was a fairly low-profile job. louis made it clear after the first round of site designs we submitted that he wanted a less-flashy, more honest and trustworthy-feeling design. he knew this was mostly about people feeling safe about spending; up to this point his design aesthetic had been quite simple and raw, and he didn’t want to confuse people by straying too far from that. given this, we kept the red, black and white tones of his previous website but aimed for the more moody, atmospheric feeling design we felt best suited for viewing a film. we then proceeded to condense the content of the site right down to only that which people needed to “buy the thing” with. “buy the thing” was just one of the many wonderful colloquialisms louis asked that we use instead of the regular tone of language you tend to expect on an e-commerce site. our favourite of these was perhaps the naming schema he had us develop for when people forgot their passwords: try it yourself and you’ll likely end up with a new password of the likes of numbnuts.bjy5 or moron.abt3.

the coding for the site was a whole separate matter. this site was to be one of our greatest tests in this department due to the size of the video files, the importance of a frictionless purchase flow and the vast quantity of users we expected to hit the site both at launch and on a daily basis. as louis put it,

“i want people in prison to be able to get this.”

the site presented technical challenges in two primary ways: ease and scale. given the size and dedication of louis’s both national and international audience we decided that paypal, for its ubiquity and security, would be a reasonable place to start for payment processing. for the scalability of the app we chose to use amazon web services, tapping thomas chippendale of verran in england to manage and load-test the amazon infrastructure. in general AWS worked out extremely well – although after the opening weekend they gave us a wonderfully delicate call to ask if we were aware of the bandwidth bill the site had chalked up.

for the development of the application itself we chose the open-source fuelPHP framework. the application was simple in essence: manage accounts, stream the show, make the show available for download, and secure the files for paying fans. though we knew from the outset that piracy was inevitable, we wanted the paid, legitimate experience to be as easy as stealing. to lead development we enlisted the exceptional skills of longtime collaborator and friend jules janssen, whose understanding of the complexity of heavy traffic loads made him an obvious choice.

using the site, you’ll notice that we deliberately avoided forcing users to check an email account to complete the purchase – this was something louis insisted upon due to his own frustrations with waiting for validation emails in the past. therefore the purchase flow moves from “enter email address” to “pay with paypal” to “download”. no intermediary stages, no need to wait for an email address: you buy it, it’s yours. the site is intended to offer “one true path” to purchase, with no option to make the wrong decision or lack of clarity about what you’re supposed to be doing.

furthermore, bearing in mind the broad range of technical know-how and preference among louis’ fans, we built in html5 and ogg theora fallbacks for content to better serve the array of devices and platforms they use, and also out of respect to the free software community.

understanding full-well that this was one of the more high-profile jobs we’d taken on and that no matter how refined a system we’d built, we’d be taking not just a heavy server hit but also criticism from a number of online factions, we did not farm out the tech support but rather handled it personally. this meant we could have an open discourse with users who had specific ideas regarding improvements to the site. one particular email from richard stallman, founder of the free software foundation, recommending offering an anonymous payment system, served as an excellent reminder of the impact louis’s approach to this project was having on people. during the weekend the site went live, if you had had any reason to email the tech support team, you will have received a reply from either giles or myself, sitting as we were in his living room sipping cups of tea and drafting replies.

from meeting louis to delivery of the site was a period of approximately one month: designing and specifying the application, provisioning the amazon web services, developing, testing, go-live. we’ve since continued to provide tech support and handle a number of last minute updates to the site on louis’s whim. his ceaseless ambition for the scope of the project combined with a regular flow of ideas back and forth between his team, ours and the users via tech support, has meant the site continues to evolve and streamline itself in subtle ways. a couple of times louis would think of a way he wanted to expand the site’s scope and then demand it to be ready by the end of the next day for an appearance he was making on a talk show. this way he could announce the change on the broadest level possible and ensure the site was moving as fast as his brain was. this is what mr. scott must have felt like as chief engineering officer under captain kirk on the starship enterprise - the greater good being the stakes, the fundamental physical limitations of being human, the only thing in the way.

the question of how we’d approach the setup any differently now that we’ve learnt so much from the experience is an important one. our understanding of large scale file-serving concerns, of open-source fan interests and of just how frank you can and should be with internet users to appease their interests is now well-developed. in short, working on this project was utterly refreshing. louis’s “fuck you” approach to a massive scale sales platform, which we all know can be such a tedious process of trying to be overly accommodating and polite, appealed to our own design ethics massively and therefore continued to make this project a joy to work on. practically speaking, it allowed us to be all the more frank with users through the tech support system and ultimately get to the heart of each of their concerns much faster. when you’re allowed to talk freely about the fact that they can and will steal your product but would be happy to pay if we just set things up right, it helps you put together a better system. so long as everyone is being honest and no one feels like they’re being fucked over, worthwhile compromises are reached much faster. the slew of emails we’ve received from people stating that they’d never heard of louis before, but were buying the special simply because of his approach to selling it and the price he was selling it for, was heartwarming to say the least.

needless to say, if you haven’t yet watched louis CK – live at the beacon theater, you should. it’s very, very funny and largely because it’s honest, true and to the point – an approach that we believe has contributed hugely to every aspect of the success of this project. as of writing this article louis has made over 1 million dollars through the website and there’s an article in the new york times detailing his efforts in this regard. it’s important of course to not get carried away with the hype surrounding a project like this. louis was of course already well established and his success here is reflective of both that and the strong desire of internet users to support an attempt to reinvent the media business model. here’s something reggie watts said on the matter, soon after the site had gone live, that resonated with us in this regard -

“i’m so glad [the louis CK] experiment is working. however it is important to note that it is not a new concept nor that surprising that it is succeeding (thankfully). in fact it wasn’t even that big of a risk! the reason being common sense prevails. fans who love an artist want to see that artist succeed therefore if that artist invests energy, creates an experience and extends a generous hand directly to them, more often than not it will be met by an even greater positive return. this model has been pioneered by DIY, independent and some labeled artists of varying mediums over the last few decades to great success (recalling radiohead). i think what is most important about louis’ project is the nowness; it’s a much needed reminder for the entertainment industry and encouragement to other artists finding ways to navigate their crafts with creativity intact.”

we’ve certainly worked with companies like topspin for a while who’ve been making every effort they can to put the power of such a business model directly into the hands of artists. the main thing is to remember that you do now have the power to make the money you deserve yourself, so long as you have something people actually want, or rather, that is any good. the labels, publishers, film studios and television networks of the world used to be able to help you force-feed a turd into the mouths of fans whilst fanning your ego and quietly adjusting your image as best they could. these days you really have to make something outstanding because as we all know, it’s a “try now, pay later” market out there. so, when that masterpiece is finally ready, be excited that at the least you now have total control.

to accompany the release of 65daysofstatic’s new record, a rescoring of the 1972 science fiction film silent running, i have written a fairly in depth article that discusses the creation of the artwork. the article is the third in a series that i’ve written for the independent filmmaker project and you can read an excerpt of it here -

so a week passed, the hurricane was about to hit and i knew where i had to go with this. i chose not to run the idea by the band, mostly as I simply had no idea whether i could successfully pull it off any way. i’d never really drawn spaceships before and whilst i had an inkling of how i was going to do it, i truly expected a messy failure of some description to result from it. sitting down at my machine as people along the brooklyn waterfront were taping big Xs in their windows like hundreds of fox mulders with too many unanswered questions, i began to piece things together. all of the while i couldn’t stop repeating over and over what sara goldfarb says at the beginning of the film requiem for a dream, as her son is stealing her television to pay for drugs -

“this isn’t happening. and if it should be happening, it would be all right. so don’t worry, seymour. it’ll all work out. you’ll see already. in the end it’s all nice.”

by which i think my brain was saying that sometimes you have to trust there’s a reason for your motivations, because sometimes your subconscious is simply way ahead of you.

you can read the rest of the article here.

when 65daysofstatic were asked to write an article for issue 2 of underscore magazine, the magazine’s editors got in touch with us and asked that they might use some of the photographs we’d taken of the band whilst touring with them. we have since stayed in touch with the magazine, and were very kindly asked to pitch a story for issue 3, the fight issue.

we pitched three story ideas to them, one of which was a photo essay that i’d taken last christmas whilst visiting my grandparents in norfolk, england. they immediately took to the photos but asked that i accompany the shots with a small piece of writing, explaining my intentions with the shots. this soon developed into something much bigger than the intended couple of paragraphs, and swiftly started to take precedence as the driving force of the piece.

here’s excerpt from the essay -

at the end of the 1982 science fiction film blade runner, the replicant roy batty delivers a profound and lasting statement. he talks of the loss of experiences, memories and moments that occurs when someone dies. after all you certainly don’t just lose the person, you lose a completely unique perspective both on your life and the lives of countless others. an irreplaceable recording of details seemingly too obscure or trivial to write down or photograph.

quite how trivial is all relative of course. what of the tears no one saw quietly forming at the corner of the eyes that looked through the camera that photographed you being born? what of the rip in the dress on the person holding that camera, or the fight nine months before that caused that rip? the big scene. the making up. the kiss. the sex. trivial to some, but probably not to you.

you can read the rest of the essay here, and you can see the original set of photographs i took here.

nothing will compare to buying the issue, of course. this magazine is always has great articles, is printed on really nice paper stock and the overall design is pretty much impeccable. if you dig this sorta thing, by all means grab yourself a copy here.

the website for the feature film PAVILION went live today, and along with it my second blog article for the IFP in which i discuss the process that went into making the site. we were also fortunate enough to be asked to handle the film’s posters and the credit sequences. the article discusses this and explains why our treatment on all fronts aimed to reflect the very minimal, atmospheric nature of the film.

here’s an excerpt -

my co-worker zach referred me once to a film (portrait of jason, 1967) where a man is sitting there smoking a cigarette for pretty much the entire film. that’s it. talking about this on the way to get lunch one day we agreed that in a film like that, where that’s all that happens, the small things turn into huge events. zach then stopped, scratched his head and thought for a moment, whispering to the air in front of him, “what was it that happened in that one…”. i stopped too, waited, and then finally he said “ah yes, he ran out of gas on his lighter. huge deal!” we both laughed and then stepped inside jimmy’s, our regular lunch joint.

so to reiterate, pavilion really is one of those exact films. it’s almost fair to say that if you blink or cough, you could miss the entire ‘reveal’ at the end of it. there are tiny fragmented shards of dialogue that tell you what’s happening whilst all the while you’re watching the most detached, beautiful and mesmerizing footage of kids feeling out the moments in those long, long, useless days of our youth. in fact what i said when i came back from the bathroom after tim had screened his movie for us was ‘congratulations’. congratulations for capturing that feeling of the abstract, aimless ennui of what it was to be young, with almost no sense of responsibility at all.

you can read the rest of the article here.

the above cover of the new big black delta album has existed in one form or another for a year or more. aside from the protomen act II logo, this is the longest we’ve had to sit on something and let it mature. it has therefore had to suffer being discarded a few times and consequently being heaved back onto the table for repair. this is largely because we were nervous and didn’t trust that the visual came close to the power of the music. thus we kept searching for a way to express that, and consequently found ourselves staring at this piece again and again, realizing it was the closest we’d ever come.

the idea behind this cover was essentially two-fold -

first up whilst the EP depicted elements passing through space toward something, the LP we felt should be emblematic of the place they were all headed – the core or nucleus sucking everything in. this way we had a story of sorts, both visually and conceptually. conceptually because, as with most EPs, the songs were tested out and then some found their final resting place on the LP.

secondly we wanted something that gave you the sense of being in a minute, inner-space, just as much as the more obvious, vast, outer-space setting the artwork appeared to depict at first glance. we wanted it to feel like the genesis of an idea, or the microscopic core of the beginnings of an erruption, as much as a planetoid or huge cataclysm in space. you see we were into the idea that jonathan bates’ first band, mellowdrone, had had an album cover with a man clutching his head as it exploded, and that subsequently this record was perhaps illustrating the inside of that same head. the nucleus of the eruption, be it psychological or physical, that lead to the head exploding. the assumption being that both images, for us, represented the state the band was in, the lyrics and the overall tone.

whilst big black delta is very much a more personal, solo musical endeavor for jon, mellowdrone saw him very much more in a band environment, in more of a democracy and also dealing with a sense of disenfranchisement. so the angry bear album cover was an external view of the result of a certain psychology, and the BBDLP1 cover is a depiction therefore, also, of something more personal, from somewhere more unique to just jon.

beyond the hand-drawn elements themselves the cover was also treated with a level of distressing and texture. the reason for this is that the music itself was treated in a similar fashion. jon deliberately kept certain glitches and errors that happened in the processing or compression of each track in order to give it a more freeform and ‘fuck it’ attitude. so in turn we effectively threw the record on the floor at a UFO convention and let everyone stampede across it as they made their way from bob lazar’s talk on alien spaceship reverse engineering over to the preview screenings of the next series of ancient aliens.

so what next? well jon is of course working on new music and we’re already working on new artwork. as jim carroll says in the basketball diaries “come on, reggie, you know this game never ends.”

stay tuned.