AMP Visual

The Virgin Prunes – a short design history

A short time after working with U2 I was introduced to their friends and sometime touring partners the Virgin Prunes. In fact at the gig in Howth where U2 played two sets (one as The Hype, as a five piece band and the second as the four member U2) it was also the live debuts of the Virgin Prunes and my own (then) band The Modern Heirs – incidentally Adam Clayton played with all four bands that evening. That was the start of a long-time relationship that included the design of many of the covers for their recorded output.

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It’s always a very exciting time for AMP Visual when a big band we’re working with, release a big album. This is especially the case when it’s the essential, career defining second. The moment that makes or breaks a group.

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We’ve worked with U2 for a long time as their graphic designers and through the years we’ve made quite a number of design pieces for the band. So we thought we’d do an occasional blog called U2 x 5. The idea is simply for us to take 5 related graphic pieces we’ve designed for the band and comment on them. This blog is about U2 logos.

Logos, they’re absolutely all around us. They are the shorthand and visual idiom of our age. We have always enjoyed making these little marks and symbols for U2. We’ve picked just five logos out of the many we’ve made for the band and say a few words about each.

The Joshua Tree

The isolated silhouette drawing of the Joshua tree was the first U2 logo to appear that people recognised globally. It works both literally and figuratively and it is highly memorable. People connect it intrinsically with the U2 masterpiece album and as such the icon has inherited the characteristics of integrity and a certain kind of honesty and beauty. The tree itself has a lovely very individual shape with its unusual branches and leaves. The logo represents all that that album means to people, so much so that some people have it as a tattoo.

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Not many designers relish the late evening call from a client as it invariably means one of two things. It’s the client’s eleventh hour and the design agency they were previously using hasn’t come up with a suitable result (and the budget’s all spent), or it’s the eleventh hour and your client needs something from you by the twelfth hour (and we’ll discuss the budget after). The common theme here is always the ticking clock.

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AMP Visual’s Shaughn McGrath will be participating in an Offset / State 2010 event panel discussion, “Does Music Need Design Anymore?” on Friday 1st October.

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AMP Visual are a new design consultancy based at 68 Pearse Street, Dublin 2, Ireland, but our design team have a long history of producing an exciting mix of creative and innovative solutions for our clients. From brand identity to web design AMP Visual are open for business.

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After building a credible reputation for a particular brand for many years it is something of a jolt to the system to be forced to start again from scratch. It becomes a time to re-access what your doing and why you’re actually doing it – aside from the obvious need to make a living. So when we formed AMP visual it gave us the opportunity to take our future into our hands.

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It’s not everyday that we get to design an item for something resembling a spacecraft, engines lit, ready for liftoff, but the cover image of our latest in a long line of pieces of work for U2 has just that feel. We’ve just finished designing the packaging for the U2360º Live DVD, filmed in Pasadena, California in October 2009, the cover of which is a live shot of the show with the stage bathed in red and gold with lights blazing and the entire 97,000 audience fantastically illuminated that we worked hard to get just right.

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