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.

The first piece was the cover for the 7″ EP Twenty Tens released on their own Baby Records in 1981 and was based on a found painting that was supplied by Gavin Friday and Guggi the two band members most interested and involved with the design process. They then signed to Rough Trade and the next series of releases was titled A New Form Of Beauty which consisted of  7″, 10″ and 12″ singles as well as a cassette. Guggi and Gavin worked closely on the simple packaging idea which included a script font over a photograph of crumbled paper. Each format used some of Guggi’s individualistic pen and ink illustrations on the back cover. Reproduced in monochrome it was minimal, not allowing any preconceptions of the band’s distinctive image to colour their music.

Later that same year (1982) Pagan Lovesong was also released. The photography was by Dublin based fashion photographer Ursula Steiger and was based on pictures of the make-up of tribesman from, I think, Papa New Guinea found in a photographic journal. Some striking images emerged from that session and one, of Guggi, became the front cover image for the 7″ and 12″ singles, the 12″ single version had contrasting black and white sides with monochrome pictures of Guggi on one and Gavin on the other. Both had a slightly disturbing quality well suited to the music. A cut up version of the Pagan Lovesong image of Guggi was used for the Sons Find Devils video release in 1985.

The debut album… If I Die, I Die was released later that year and continued the dual options for the cover, having essentially two front covers back to back. One was photographed in the band’s rehearsal studio in Temple Bar and the other at an outdoor session. A main feature of the indoor session was fire and the most effective way to capture it. Using it as  sword struck me as  good way to get an interesting picture. That indoor session also produced the picture used on the 7″ single Baby Turns Blue. The outdoor session had a elemental feel, of a lost tribe living life without the restraints of a restrictive society. The type on this side was hand drawn.The two pictures were again taken by Ursla Steiger.

To round off a productive year the band also released a 12″ single version of Baby Turns Blue under the title The Faculties of a Broken Heart. For this I found a royalty free illustration that seemed to meet the mood of the song.

The A New Form Of Beauty four part project was released as a double album through an Italian record company and it was something of a leap in the dark as this was produced pre-internet so it was produced as board artwork and instructions on how the cover should be printed were faxed to the label. That it came out so well is a wonder and it was a pleasant surprise that they mostly got it right. It would have been nice to have been paid too though.

Over the Rainbow was the next album, released on cassette and vinyl in 1985. This was directed by Gavin Friday who showed a reference of the overall mood he wanted to capture from a Judy Garland album. This was a collection of rarities and previously unavailable tracks. Another photographic session was set up with Ursla Steiger and a very stylized picture of Gavin and Guggi was used on the front cover. It focused on their red lips and made up eyes and was a homage to an earlier era of glamour. Another image of Guggi and Gavin also graced the inner sleeve as well as a set of band individual portraits. A stylized script was again used for the band’s name.

The following year  7″ and 12″ versions of the single Love Last Forever , this featured a photograph of a vintage photo album with a picture of Gavin in the picturesque frame page. The 12″ version was sparser with just the image of Gavin and the script centered below it. The pictures for this session were taken by Conor Horgan.

For the Moon Looked Down and Laughed cover (released in 1986) again drew from the photography and styling of earlier eras. Conor Horgan was the photographer and he and I worked closely on achieving the results in the studio. Internal frictions meant that neither Guggi nor guitarist Dik were a part of the photographic sessions. By now the Virgin Prunes has established their own visual look that, for such a cutting edge musical band, drew on earlier eras and more romantic times that contrasted with the band’s earlier image. However  as they toured in Europe they were exposed to a lot of new influences which were incorporated into the band’s ever evolving musical make-up.

The final Virgin Prunes album that I worked on was The Hidden Lie that was released in 1987. It was a live album recorded in Paris and used a visual blend of a photography of interference and an old engraving to act as a visual pun on the album title.

I was not involved with the later re-issue but went on to work with Gavin Friday on his album with the Man Seezer Each Man Kills The Thing He loves.

Stephen Averill
03/04/12

AMP Visual work in a number of design disciplines in areas of cultural, entertainment, identity and corporate design and in assorted mediums and platforms from online to print, packaging to promotion. We work on projects both large and small and consistently strive to deliver original and clear communication solutions by working closely with our clients. Do contact us at info@ampvisual.com or call us on +353 1 633 7644. We’d love to do business with you.

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.

From the inception of the album chart back in the 40′s and the decades that followed, music’s historical archives are filled to the brim with bands and acts who created that “one big album”, the one that took the world by storm, but then, disappeared from the public eye, forever. However, it’s not always a case of the second album being bad, but more often the public loose interest and commercially they’re deemed not to be a success, and that’s all it takes. Next public appearance… Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

Of course, all of these thoughts were on the back of my mind in June 2010, when myself and Steve Averill travelled to London to meet the band in their studio. This was the first time we worked with the guys and were probably as anxious as any member of the team that this second album became a success. We were very excited that this great new Irish band had taken the world by storm and we wanted to be a part of it.

When the unmastered “Science & Faith” blasted from the mixing desk, Glen’s pristine percussion snapping, all the suspense abated. To my left stood Mark playing his invisible ‘Les Paul’ air-guitar, whilst Danny stood near the door, baseball cap on, his voice booming over the track, trademark arm pointing to the sky. I looked to my right, where Martin – the band’s manager – sat, he gave me a knowing ‘yes, good isn’t it’ smile.

That chanting chorus remained in my head for a week. I couldn’t wait to hear it live.

Some time later, the all important tea and biscuits arrived and we got down to business and discussed the bands vision for the design.

The concept evolved from the fact that many of the songs dealt with human relationships and interactions on a very personal level. From that initial idea, the concept of using hands as a means of expression or aggression was developed. At the same time a new ‘The Script’ logo had been developed and this was an integral part of the overall look. A few weeks later a series of design concepts were presented and finally approved. That was followed by a photo shoot wherein a numerous amount of hands – male/female,  man/child, youth/age – were photographed and then manipulated to give the cover its strong graphic dynamic.

This small show and tell will visually give you a rough idea of how this iconic sleeve was achieved.

Gary Kelly
26/03/12

Stage 1: Original photograph of combined hands on simple neutral background for simple cropping.

Stage 2: Once hands have been neatly clipped, a neutral parchment paper effect is placed on to a new layer. On top of this I place a white circle with extreme Gaussian Blur and within the Layer Effect panel create a “Hard Light” filter.

Stage 3: On a new layer, overlay a rough distressed bitmap image.

Stage 4: Bring clipped hand layer to foreground. 

At this point the hands are key. Add more depth to the hands by slightly upping the overall ‘Levels’ balance. Once this is achieved the hands will contain more colour and shadowing. Because the definition between both wrists was too slight I needed to create a dark shadow between both to lift one off the other. Initially it looks quite crude but eventually everything will blend.

Using the ‘Burn Tool’ I create shadows around all areas which need most definition – knuckles, finger nails, wrinkles and folds.

Stage 5: Using the ‘Hue Saturation’ filter I remove most (but not all) of the colour, leaving a the hands quite pasty.

Stage 6: Build the colour and density back up using the ‘Overlay’ layer filter. Take hand layer, duplicate it and overlay it two more times. This will now leave you with 3 hand layers.

Stage 7: Create another new layer and place the manipulate image below, down over full image using an ‘Overlay’ filter at 30%. This will produce a nice grain sepia effect.

Stage 8: Pull down overall curves on image to deepen colour. Pop down a nice logo, and voila, you’ve got an album cover.

Stage 9: Head over to the Letterman show in New York and play to millions of viewers. Simple!

AMP Visual work in a number of design disciplines in areas of cultural, entertainment, identity and corporate design and in assorted mediums and platforms from online to print, packaging to promotion. We work on projects both large and small and consistently strive to deliver original and clear communication solutions by working closely with our clients. Do contact us at info@ampvisual.com or call us on +353 1 633 7644. We’d love to do business with you.

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.

Zooropa – Astrobaby and ring of stars
The ZooTV tour had a fantastic hi-tech connection with satellite technology and the notion of being a TV station on the road. By the time of Zooropa’s outdoor shows, it was incredibly in your face. The icon drawing of the astrobaby surrounded by 12 stars in imitation of the European flag came to represent the tour and subsequently appeared on the cover of the Zooropa album. The logo has a whimsy and intrigue that is appealing. It can be understood without words and somehow its human smallness nicely represents the largesse and technicality of the Zooropa tour.

Pop – Lemon-planet logo
The PopMart tour had a multitude of references – a kind of celebration of 60s kitch and Americana, pop-art, and shopping were all in there. The stage featured an enormous yellow arch almost in homage to the golden arches of the McDonald’s restaurant sign and the band emerged out of a huge chrome lemon during the set. So somehow this logo – made for the tour merchandising – of a shopping trolley traveling around a lemon like a satellite made good sense.

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb – Chevrons, target and blast
While the How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb warning chevrons, the target and the ‘blast’ shape isn’t just one visual icon, it is still a visual language that worked in the same way as a logo for the album and tour campaign. The icons worked especially well on the cover of the special edition ‘handbook’ version of the album. These black and red-coloured components featured heavily as the album’s identity in promotion and advertising and through the singles from the album and consequently in the tour stage and merchandise.

U2360 – Logo
This icon represented the U2360 tour and in much the same way as The Joshua Tree logo, it’s a literal interpretation, with the logo’s simple curvilinear lines conveying the stage’s iconic shape rather than the other featured logos, which are more about representing an idea. It works well perhaps as its shape is not dissimilar to the elegant streamlined logos as seen for the likes of 60s automobiles with their reminiscence to the golden age of rockets and spacecraft.

AMP Visual work in a number of design disciplines in areas of cultural, entertainment, identity and corporate design and in assorted mediums and platforms from online to print, packaging to promotion. We work on projects both large and small and consistently strive to deliver original and clear communication solutions by working closely with our clients. Do contact us at info@ampvisual.com or call us on +353 1 633 7644. We’d love to do business with you.

AMP Visual work in a number of design disciplines in areas of cultural, entertainment, identity and corporate design and in assorted mediums and platforms from online to print, packaging to promotion. We work on projects both large and small and consistently strive to deliver original and clear communication solutions by working closely with our clients. Do contact us at info@ampvisual.com or call us on +353 1 633 7644. We’d love to do business with you.

Rita Kirwan, Marketing Director Tayto and Hunky Dorys crisps.

It’s difficult to sum up the days before the internet, wall-to-wall media and the power of online networking – the days before instantaneous speed of the transfer of information. But after U2′s Lovetown tour ended just after the Dublin Point Depot shows and Bono saying that the band would have to, ‘go away and dream it all up again’, there was an almost 2-year silence, broken only by the band’s appearance on the Red Hot And Blue Cole Porter tribute album with their version of Night And Day in 1990 – the first real inkling of the band’s new direction. Otherwise just silence.

Then suddenly, The Fly, the first single off Achtung Baby. It was as if a very different door had opened for the band that allowed them to not only sound re-invented, but that also allowed them the freedom to act in a brand new way also. There were suddenly now so many new colours and shades to the band’s palette that it was mesmerizing to hear and to see it happening.

When Achtung Baby was released three weeks later, it was to astonishing reactions. The album had a visceral heat pouring from it. It crackled with brand-new sounds. It throbbed from your sound system with its expansive, distorted metallic textures and deep rhythmic sound with a sheer intensity. Bono’s double-voice, his falsetto and deep distorted low-register vocal spat out words of dark personal angst, sexuality and intimacy unheard before in his lyrics.

I was a youngster not too long out of college working with Steve Averill’s design studio Works Associates, when he asked me to work with him on U2′s as yet untitled new studio album in early 1991, my first job for U2. I was used to seeing the panoramic, monumental and monochrome imagery of The Joshua Tree sleeve and so on, but suddenly boxes of photographs were arriving in to us of new U2 photoshoots from Anton Corbijn that were very different to what I’d ever seen for U2. They didn’t have the serious sincerity of his previous work for the band, instead Corbijn had strove for a lighter vibe and the photos were a great combination of spontaneity and of a vivid kaleidoscope of colours from arctic blue to desert red mixed with ink black and sepia-toned lith prints of intense portraiture; of new landscapes, of various animals, of serious masculine men in frocks in full-on wigs and makeup, of band members smiling, fun… and nakedness. There was an astonishing amount of photographs – hundreds of beautifully printed photographs.

For us to make a sleeve that would break the mould of any previous sleeves done for band we had to see this as a brand new phase of the band, it had to be quite different from what had been done before. We wanted the sleeve to reflect the multiplicity of themes on the album, its shades of light and dark, its sense of place and time at the dismantling of the Berlin wall. We didn’t want a fashion sleeve, something that would be out of date soon after. We strove hard to make a ‘classic’ album sleeve that would thematically have both depth and meaning and that would go to form the complete album both sonically and visually. No one image was enough to convey the shades and personalities on the record and so out of many experiments we ended up with a regular grid of images with examples shown to the band of sleeves by the likes of Pink Floyd and The Who.

The Achtung Baby early sleeve drafts

This meant that each image on the cover had to carry a lot of weight both in itself and in its relationship between the array in terms of significance and theme. Overall, the sleeve’s chaotic riot of colour was like that of a closeup of the graffitied Berlin wall and the package’s technicolour palette also indicated the album’s lyrical heat and sonic chill. The images are a series of related parts, a deliberate mesh of contrasts and tones, of iconography, of colour and light, of abstraction and of humanity. We searched within photos to find details that became images in their own right, the close up of the door panel of the painted Trabant, the snake held aloft that seems poised to strike a passing bird, the sickle moon, the closeup of the star on The Edge’s trousers and the rings on The Edge’s fingers spelling out U-2.

Near the release date, as the album’s recording gained speed so the needle was touching break-neck, word was reaching back to us of further ideas, last-minute song changes and an eleventh hour graffitting of the Windmill Lane recording studio premises stone wall of Achtung babies by artist Charlie Whisker which were quickly photographed by Richie Smyth even as the paint dribbled. These photos made for the CD and vinyl labels.

The final days were spent handwriting the band’s name, the album’s name and song titles with ink and pens, brushes, the end of implements, to match the gush of spontaneity and power of the photography. Then in contrast to the unique humanity of the brush and ink lettering, for the lyrics and credits we employed the ubiquitous European font Helvetica that mirrored the repetitive industrial and Germanic themes of the album that also contrasted with the Americana of the title font used on The Joshua Tree, expanded Garamond.

The brush and ink came out again before the project’s end as it became evident that certain territories were uncomfortable handling a naked photo of Adam that featured on the back cover of the vinyl format and so we were required paint a large ‘X’ to censor the offending area for those territories.

The album’s design was put together in the final days before computers entered our design studio. So the artwork was put together on boards with photos traced into position on trace paper overlays and with all type indicated by us and then set for us at a type-setting house and resized with ‘repro camera’ onto a kind of photo paper then spray glued into position by hand with the aid of a scalpel and ruler. Every lyric or credit change meant for a fresh visit to the darkroom to output a new contact print, stripping the old artwork out and applying the amended piece. The final artwork left the premises along with the photographs themselves to be scanned at the repro house and the resulting scan films glued into position by the reprographics guy – an entire skill and job title that has long since ceased to be.

Even as the studio door was closing on the courier collecting the artwork, we were working on turning Charlie Whisker’s graffiti baby into a graphic icon and then coming up with our own – a car and a star for album merchandise. We added hugely to this iconography in the months ahead and by the time of the ZooTV Outside Broadcast and the Zooropa tours, we had a whole library of these little iconic drawings – everything from a fish to a bicycle and from a satellite dish to the baby in a spacesuit helmet surrounded by a ring of stars that became the prototype for the later Zooropa album cover.

I have fond memories of us making the packaging for that album. We were aware at the time that this was an important album and that the incredible amount of positive energy coming from all involved was making for something unique and new and even as the final touches were going in place we looked forward to its reaction with great expectation.

When it came time to make the re-issue it was like revisiting an old friend. Seeing the photography again with new eyes it’s as good as ever. The themes, the details and connections we made then 20 years back in the packaging they still look fresh. We treated this re-issue project with respect, the photography, pristinely restored, was presented large, the artwork laid out with care. We wanted the packagings to have heft and to resemble physically the weight that this album emotionally carries.

Shaughn McGrath, November 2011

AMP Visual work in a number of design disciplines in areas of cultural, entertainment, identity and corporate design and in assorted mediums and platforms from online to print, packaging to promotion. We work on projects both large and small and consistently strive to deliver original and clear communication solutions by working closely with our clients. Do contact us at info@ampvisual.com or call us on +353 1 633 7644. We’d love to do business with you.