8 of the coolest band websites

1. MGMT

Check this website out! Hint: you can draw on all the cool colors that float around!

2. George Ezra

This is a beautiful and fun design. The landscape scene adds pieces of interest, like random things popping up out of the buildings.

3. Patrick Kunka

You can play the drum set! If that doesn't make a website I don't know what does.

4. Jack Johnson

The shelf look is cool, with the ukulele and the animated objects that you can click on to view different parts of his website.

5. Nothing But Thieves

This one's cool because it has floating words and animations, and the art that's featured is beautiful.

6. Red Hot Chili Peppers

So the landing page of the RHCP's site has this cool animated board right now, and when you click into the website there's this fascination with bees going on...so there's a bee crawling around the screen.

7. Coldplay

There's the cool black background with rainbows and floating objects everywhere. It's very whimsical.

8. Lady Gaga

The scribbling in the background and all the animated pictures make Lady Gaga's website very interesting and engaging.

Posters for musicals: Hamilton

You've probably heard a lot about the musical Hamilton and seen this cool poster and logo around.

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The official Hamilton musical poster

This poster was a project by SpotCo, a firm that has designed posters for many, many shows.

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They're a pretty big deal.

So, what went behind the designing of the Hamilton poster? In a recent interview with Variety, Drew Hodges, the founder of SpotCo, said they always believed Hamilton was loved by people of all ages, so "there was not a real goal to portray the show as this incredibly cutting-edge young thing, even though it is, in many ways." They wanted the design to be classic and long-lasting. Hodges feels the metallic gold is a timeless feature to the poster -- it fits for both pop culture now and historical 1776.

More importantly, through a Broadway musical poster, Hodges says you're attempting to convey how it will feel to attend the show. The poster isn't meant to show people what happens in the show; it's "making an emotional promise," Hodges says.

Hodges said that the firm created nearly 30 designs for this musical over two months. Here are a few of their favorites that just weren't quite the right fit:

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 This poster, featuring a quill pen, would have "animated really well," according to Hodges, but "it's just too 'Revolutionary War.'"

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 Personally, I really like this design. I don't think it's quite fit to be the final design for the Hamilton poster, but it's interesting and fun to look at. But as Hodges said, "It's cool, but ... It looks like a 'rock and roll Hamilton.'" And he felt that would have limited the musical to the specific genre.

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 I didn't like this poster at first glance, but I've warmed up to it. I like the emotion conveyed through the pose of the person in black-and-white, and I like the bold attitude of the spray-paint and handwriting. Ultimately, this one didn't make the cut because "the handwriting is too modern. Again, it's pushing too hard to do 'rock and roll Hamilton,'" said Hodges.

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The team liked this poster a lot -- the design concept is very cool. But as Hodges said, "We started with a wide group of options and drilled down, down, down."

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I can't say I love this design -- Hodges said this "was a good one, I just don't think it's a good graphic, in the end." The main attraction is the text. The words flow well down to the point of Hamilton and they're very catchy. They're just a little too hard to read on this design, and the overlapping aspect feels a little un-put-together, even though it was intended.

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What I really like about this art is how many picture and symbols are hidden in the ink and the white space. You can spend a lot of time looking at this one. The thing about this poster was that "this wasn't it, and the one we used really was," Hodges said. It just wasn't quite right for the musical.

This site had great information on several posters that were in the running to advertise and represent Hamilton.

There's also a book, On Broadway: From Rent to Revolution, a portfolio of the works of Spotco. If you're interested in the behind-the-scenes creative process behind classic and awesome Broadway posters, you should probably check this out.

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How album art came to be

Picture: The New York Times

This is Alex Steinweiss. He's neat because he was the originator of album cover artwork. Before Steinweiss came along, most album covers looked like this:

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As in -- they were pasteboard sleeves stamped with the work's title and the artist's name, and that's pretty much it.

Record labels did offer "record albums," but these weren't for individual albums; they were for a collection of albums. Generally all of these collection covers looked the same.

Enter 23-year-old Steinweiss, newly hired as Columbia Records's first art director. His job description included designing promotional displays and advertisements for the record label. But Steinweiss decided it would be cool to replace the plain brown/tan/green paper album covers (which he said "were not attractive, and lacked sales appeal") with brightly decorated, visually pleasing designs to attract customers' attention.

His first go at it was a cover for Rodgers & Hart, for which he and a photographer found inspiration in the Imperial Theatre's marquee -- they got the owner of the theater to change the marquee signage to say what appears on the cover of the album pictured here.

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And here we find ourselves with the very first album cover.

With Steinweiss's beautiful album artwork, record sales increased by almost 900%, which Columbia realized was a huge success. Ever since then our album covers have been graced with unique, interesting and engaging visual artwork. And Steinweiss's covers are well-known as symbols of the golden age of jazz, popular, and classical music.

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You can view many more designs at Steinweiss's website.

"I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music." -Alex Steinweiss

By the way -- here is a great New York Times article on Steinweiss's life; a bit of biographical information for those wanting to know more about the man behind the album artwork.

A few of my favorite, new-classic album covers

There are many beautiful, classic album covers from the second half of the 20th century that are fascinating to study. But there are so many good album covers coming out now (and in the past decade or so) that I might as well dedicate a blog post to some of what I think are the most interesting, engaging and aesthetically pleasing covers that we can all draw inspiration from. So here's some of my favorites! They're pretty cool to look at.

Plain White T's
One of my all-time favorites

I love the cover of "All That We Needed" because of the contrast of the bright yellow background behind the black and white jeans and shoes. It makes me think of a NYC taxi, which brings us to the next cover. 

Plain White T's
A classic

"What's it like in New York City?" 

Both the song and this cover are a classic. Any other time this font (who knows what it's called?) is used, it looks ... unprofessional. But here, it just works. Since this song came out in 2005, this slightly old-fashioned font works well to indicate the time period this cover was designed. And it's clean and simple, set against the cool, rainy background of the person walking in the lit-up city. I love this one. It sets the mood of the song.

Avril Lavigne
The first CD I ever loved

Since Avril Lavigne was my first favorite artist, and "Let Go" was my first favorite CD (and still remains my forever go-to music), this album cover had to be on the list. It's in the city theme, with Avril still and sharp against the busy, blurry background. The punk lettering of "Avril Lavigne. Let Go" is perfect for Avril circa 2002.

Andrew McMahon (Jack's Mannequin)

I love "Everything In Transit" because of the illustrations of the California beach town and the details -- "This Is A Story..." written on the billboard or whatever's on the side of that building, the cool biplane trailing the name of the band, the cursive handwriting of the album's title in the corner.

Andrew McMahon (Jack's Mannequin)

"The Ghost Overground" EP's cover is cool because a) the scene draws you in. An open road in the California desert, the contrast of the guy in the black jacket and his black shadow against the highway -- I don't know, it makes me want to take a road trip or something and b) I love the font they picked for Jack's Mannequin. It's another one of those serif fonts that looks a little old-fashioned but just works.

Cold War Kids

From what I've seen of Cold War Kids art, they are going all out on the sort of handwriting/casual scrawl look.

Cold War Kids

This is the back of the Cold War Kids's album "Loyalty to Loyalty" -- it's neat to look at what they've done with text sizing and spacing to keep these song titles interesting.

Cold War Kids

I mean, what are they doing? Scrapbooking?

Cold War Kids

Cold War Kids

You have to admit, they look pretty awesome.

The Black Keys

Of course, this Black Keys album had to go on the list. You can't get much more straightforward than this.

I do like what they did here. Obviously it's simple, with just red used to emphasize the band's name. And they changed the font size for the important words! It doesn't have to be complicated to look good.

American Authors

First off, I want to say how much I like the American Authors band logo. The "X" looks good overlaying the photograph, which I also love. The old-fashioned filtered photos of New York City may be a little cliche, but they still look awesome.

American Authors

All Time Low

I just enjoy this album cover for how much is going on -- zombies? Burning city? The band members running in? And some giant monster taking over everything, of course. (This cover is literally illustrating an all-time low.) You could spend a lot of time just gazing at this album cover, finding new details you missed at first. It tells a story in a bunch of funny-looking drawings.

Andrew McMahon (Something Corporate)

From the same guy who brought you Jack's Mannequin, here's the band Something Corporate. This album cover is also kinda scrapbook-y, and it makes me think of a roadtrip or a guy who's just living on the road, a nomad-type. The grungy lettering on both the front and the back looks good with the stampy (for lack of a better word) images of the guys and the car.

Andrew McMahon (Something Corporate)

Soundcloud (Ben Phipps)

I looked at this artwork and thought, "wow, this is cool." Then I saw the guy standing in front of the sky in the elephant and decided it was awesome. This is just beautiful design. I love the geometric shapes that the lines criss-crossing the elephant form. And the photo in the elephant is intriguing.

Alessia Cara

First, I like the handwriting on "Four Pink Walls." Handwriting definitely gets overused, but I like it on this album cover anyway. I also like how simple this cover is, how well the colors go together (pink with red? Who knew it could work? Alessia Cara's album designers, that's who), and Alessia's outfit choice.

MGMT

What does this mean? What are they doing in this picture? I mean, sometimes it's more fun to just look at the cover and decide for yourself instead of Googling what exactly you're supposed to get from it. Who cares? It's MGMT. They do what they want.