theres dudes i fucks with in the world of design and art. there's dudes whose style i admire, dudes who show amazing skill and thought in their work. but rarely do i ever feel anyone's nailed shit so dead on and consistently that i gotta ride hard for them on some fanboy shit. the one exception may be Jacob Bannon. jake bannon is most well known as the singer for boston metal/hardcore OG's Converge. dudes have been putting it down with an intensity and artistry that few can match in any form of music, they sound vaguely like a more pissed off and artsy version of Slayer (but i'll get into all that in a post at some point in the future) and they've been killing it for like 15 years now. beyond dude's involvment in Converge (where he is responsible for all of the art direction and design) he's also one of the leading freelance designers in the world of hardcore and metal as well as the head of Deathwish Inc. records (he designs the packaging for all of their releases).
as a designer bannon is most known for having a very dark, gritty style with lots of texture. his work has an very organic feel yet is always evocative and nuanced. usually playing with light and shading to create very ominous looking pieces. around '98 - '99 is when i really started to take notice of his skill when i purchased Poison The Well's "The Opposite Of December", that album was incredibly emotive mixture of emotional hardcore with precisely executed metal. it was an instant classic that ignited a huge amount of copycat bands and jocking. one of the things that served to push the album into classic status was bannon's immaculate CD design. for the packaging he picked up on the theme of seasons changing and created a layout that had a spread for each season with winter being the cover. each two page spread was a vivid usage of photo-collage. in summer bright reds, greens and yellows leaped from the page at you while in winter dark blue and black hues overlay white snow splatter and a grinning skull.
the design of the cd worked on multiple levels (as all great design should). first its important to understand the climate to which this album was released. unlike today when its quite common to hear sing-screaming over hardcore in '98 it was still a rather novel idea. while poison the well were far from the first ones to do it, this album was an extremely polar incarnation of the formula, with the hardcore being very metal influenced and the softer parts being quite subdued. and at this time guys who liked metal were not often the same guys who enjoyed quietly sung songs about heartbreak. so to say the album was released into a somewhat unsure market, if not hostile market would be an understatment. but in having the front cover of the record utilize the winter motif with skull, bannon was able to appeal to the visual lexicon of metal and hardcore buyers easily. upon quick glance this could without too much of a stretch of the imagination be a slickly produced death metal album cover. at the same time bannon utilizes the handwritten script and sans serif fonts for the band name and album title. both conventions are clear earmarks to the world of indie rock and emo, from which poison the well draw their softer accoutrements. so an astute indie rock buyer could easily pick up this album and wonder about the contents within. upon opening the cd itself as we witness the progression from winter setting to summer we're also provided with a visual metaphor for the bands sound, ranging from the harshness of the metal to the softness of the emo influenced parts.
in his more recent works jake bannon has shown an increasing image in biblical visual imagery and gothic styled graphics. at times he intergrates these subjects into his signature splattered, shadowed, gritty style and at other times hes applying them minimally to clean backgrounds as is on dispay on the latest set of converge merchandise. his minimal application often ends up making his work feel as though its been lifted directly from some kind of 1930's Alister Crowley esque magician's spellbook.
bannon continues to progress and change styles over his extremely prolific and influental career and has yet to fall off even slightly in his decade+ spanning career. and for that i raise a glass to homeboy as a design dude among dudes.
