Journal Entry #3: Music to my eyes.

I collect records. I love them. I like the gritty sound. The skipping (at times), the tactile feeling of really SEEING your music, the dirt you get on your hands when you're rifling through garage sale stacks in hopes of landing a Kenny Loggin 12". I love them.

Recently, I was looking through my collection and I was noticing some amazing type usage. The frist one I chose to talk about is this Lorett Lynn album, which is the soundtrack for "Coal Miner's Daughter", the movie in which Sissy Spacek did an exceptional job portraying the country music legend. Here is the cover:


I love how campy it is. I get the feeling that I am in Frontierland in Disneyland or something. It feels SO Loretta Lynn, good ol' country girl. I think that the designer did a tremendous job keeping the rest of the cover wite save the photo of Spacek in a vignette feel.

Secondly, who doesn't love the Boss, right? I never really got the whole Springsteen thing until very recently. My mom loves him, but I never really saw the big deal. Well, now I get it. Maybe it's a tell tale sign I'm getting older; I don't know. Anyways, I think this cover is great because of the size of the otherwise super typical type. It's so small in relation to the rest of the cover, it's serif, it's nothing amazing. But what get's precedence? His ass. It' great. It's like Bruce sat the designer down and was all, "Look, if they don't know who I am by now, then they aren't going to know. Just put that picture of my butt up there, front and center. Why do you think I wear these tight jeans? To play better? No, No. and while you're at it, just throw my name up there, and let 'em know the title too...yeah, just like that." I mean what would YOU say to that? He's the boss for God's sake. I like what you do Bruce.



Finally, I am not crazy about The Doors. I actually bought this album because it has that "Whiskey Song"(which is actually called "Alabama Song" but whatevs)on it, and my room mate and I joke about how awful that song is. That being said, I think that te logo design for The Doors is great. Especially for the time that the album was produced (1967). I have a new appreciation for te time it takes to produce hand generated type WITH the use of computers. I can barely believe that designers were capable of manipulatiing type the way they were in pre-CS4 days. I really like the Doors logo. There I said it.