Treacherous Orchestra - Origins - Album Artwork

This project has been a mammoth effort. Imagination, technique and patience have all been tested. The result is something which is radical for the genre in which this band are classed. The brief was ambitious and convoluted, trying to balance full frontal heavy metal edge with the staid sensibilities of the folk scene.The main influence for the logo were ambigrams; ambigrams are words constructed into a bespoke typeface that enables the word to be read from any direction. This is and artform in itself highly time consuming and the end result is often something that only the font savvy can read. Here's some examples. This was an enormous challenge; By it's very definition a logo has to be relatively legible, in all honesty i'm big fan of convoluted, indecipherable glyphs, I find them engaging, they hold a lot a weight and if associated with something successful can elevate something from the mundane to cult status. However when taken in a modern context and especially in a music scene which is pretty conservative, this balls out approach was something that needed curbed. It's fair to say that i created a lot of fonts to arrive at the final logo. What we arrived at was nothing anywhere near to the original brief but this is what development is all about, taking a creative ideal and forming it into something that people can still easily engage with. In fairness this logo is still not especially readable to a lot of people but in the end it's something with a certain amount of individuality, it certainly looks more metal than folk but it certainly has a solid graphical footprint and is identifiable at any scale and on any background.The cover art was a far more straight froward effort, again the final result was no where near the brief but the original idea was taken on, developed, grew it's own legs and ended up forming itself. The album entitled origins had to reflect the bands traditional roots yet covey the modern influences of dance, metal, funk, jazz... The brief was based around tree roots, a simple and straight forward way to convey what the band wanted. So off I set into the woods on a bright summers day camera in hand and an eye on the bottom of trees. I must have walked about 8 or 9 miles on my quest and I certainly picked up lots of nice shots of treee roots; whilst wandering through the thicket I saw a fallen tree, it's gnarled roots planted in a bog had lifted a huge pit of earth up with them and created a pretty sizeable pool. After snapping away at the roots for a minute I noticed that the pool was teeming with pond skaters. They look cool i thought, out came the macro lens and I tried to get the crosshairs onto them. Standing in a bog trying to get a shot of something 2cm long that move at speed with a 200mm macro lens is no mean feat. So I had to improvise, my light reflector was fashioned into an ad hoc mat and I lay on my stomach in the bog using my bag as a foundation for my elbows and shot there for a good half hour. I got the shots but when I stood up I realised that I, my relfector and my bag were pretty muddy and soaked through. A small price to pay for some photos which i'm not afraid to say i am pretty proud of.Getting the graphic design done on this cover was also a long and winding road of collaborative development. Many long nights were spent in huddles round the mac, sometimes 6 or 7 people strong, trying out ideas, moving stuff around and trying to arrive at something that the whole band was happy with. I'm not afraid to say that this was testing job, patience wore very thin with pretty much everyone involved and at times it was hard to see how it would all hang together but perseverance is key in any creative endeavor. Slowly but surely the problems were solved and it was a valuable exercise in sideways thinking. It's a credit to the band that they became so focussed and involved in the graphical portrayal of their music. They want to stand out, they want to push things forward and they put the hard work into achieving a balance that the record company, the fans, themselves and I were happy with.Aside from all the hard hours spent in huddled development the website t-shirts and posters have all come together quickly. The website is a nice standard Wordpress job, simple, effective and easy to manage. The t-shirts were done by the ever reliable bar-one, the print is nice and thick on lovely smooth 100% cotton shirts which have a lovely quality feel. Posters have yet to be printed but i'm looking forward to seeing the photographs in large scale.This job is by no means over, the band are ambitious and in my opinion have the ability to cross over and enjoy a great deal of success, time will tell but in the meantime you can be rest assured that there will be videos, more photos, more music and more merchandise. We all have the bit between our teeth and the future of acid croft, turbo diddle, ethno thrash is well and truly on the blast. I have a lot of faith in what this band does and they have invested the same faith in me, this makes for a powerful partnership and I am confident that this shit will fly. Is the album artwork a timeless classic? I don't know. Time and what the band do in the future will test it. One thing I do know is that it's constructed from a lot of good peoples blood, sweat and soul.— Website is here http://www.treacherousorchestra.com/— And my post on the band photography is here.