AMP Visual

We’re very proud to have designed and illustrated this U2 Signature Series limited-edition shirt for Hard Rock. It’s in support of Amnesty International with a portion of the price benefitting its work in support of their campaigning for human rights worldwide and is available in Hard Rock stores.

‘I hope this T-shirt generates loads of cash for Amnesty International and their tireless work towards the release of prisoners of conscience all around the world,’ said The Edge. ‘Plus there’s a guitar on it – so it’s a win-win as far as I’m concerned.’ The shirt is printed on a navy blue EDUN Live T-shirt made from 100% African cotton and was launched to coincide with International Human Rights Day and will be available worldwide.

The slogan on the front of the shirt, ‘Humanity, Justice, Equality’ comes from the headstone epitaph of Susan Brownell Anthony (1820 – 1906), a 19th century American civil rights leader for women’s rights.

This is the story of the production of the record breaking 2009 to 2011 U2360 tour, told through band and personnel interviews. It features live band photography from across the tour along with tons of production and on-the-road and band non-performance photography. The book is 256-page hardback with a flycover.

Alongside the 20th anniversary release of Achtung Baby album, there was a documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about U2 and the production of their 1991 album. The band partly recorded the album in Berlin’s famous Hansa Studio where the song “One” was born. The film poster with the iconic photograph of the band’s drummer Larry Mullen looking skyward in harmony with the film’s title, saw him standing beside a broken down East German Trabant car; an emblem of the album and the ZooTV tour. The other image is of a painted Trabant by Thierry Noir parked beside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. The documentary film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.

We recently made some cool, grungy U2 T-shirts for retail sale in the US using iconic band imagery and shows from the band’s archive.

U2′s own website, U2.com, have a yearly subscription offer through which the subscriber gets a gift for signing up. Here’s one we designed; a vinyl-sized 24-page book that also contained 2 CDs full of live tracks from the band’s U2360 tour, with all of the tracks being uniquely chosen by U2 fans through their website.

We enjoyed making this very limited edition 12 inch triple vinyl packaging for U2′s Artificial Horizon which is an album of remixes from the band’s career which appears on purple vinyl. The vinyl was only available for a limited time through the band’s own website U2.com.

U2 Duals is a limited edition subscription CD from U2.com for which we designed the packaging and identity and features vocal duets with the likes of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Jay-Z and Rihanna.

In homage to the great Wide Awake In America ep released in 1985, we designed its partner Wide Awake In Europe 12 inch vinyl to the same template – finding evocative photography of the same qualities as the previous ep. This latest ep was limited to only 5,000 copies available through records stores primarily in the US and each sleeve was stamped on the back with a unique number.

We have just finished the packaging for the U2 360° DVD/Blu-Ray project (Deluxe DVD Pack shown) which was a great array of packaging types and promotional material. One of the six packaging formats available is a Super Deluxe Limited Edition box containing plenty of goodies.

From the inception of this project the title was – No Line on the Horizon – it meant many things to us, but mostly it meant the removing of any barriers, a longing to return to a perfect moment, or release. We discovered the beautiful photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Boden Sea, Uttwil’. This velvet image of Sugimoto’s was set very simply in a white surround to make the cover. We added then the equals mark idiom, as a form of title. It sits above the image on a different plane, a different language – that of mathematics – but universally understood nonetheless. The implication of parallel forces is there; of nature and human natures, light and dark, harmony and discord.

We followed through with the rest of the packaging which included photographs of the band by Anton Corbijn taken in Dublin and Fez, Morocco. The packaging also included a special limited edition box set and a 2-disc digipak, for which we devised an interesting folding that always kept the same horizon line throughout, it that also included a folded poster.

For the 20th anniversary of U2 Achtung Baby, we were asked to produce various pieces of promotion for both print advertising for ads and posters and online uses. One of the pieces we did had no identifying band name or album title on it at all, just the by now famous Bono ‘Fly Glasses’ and the lyrics to the song The Fly.