The Return of . . . KISS (#1)

I’ve been waiting a few months to be able to talk about this—and I have talked about it to some degree in a few online interviews, but not really in any detail. Back in April of this year I received a telephone call from out of the blue—from somewhere in South America. At the other end of the line was KISS’ Paul Stanley. It’d been more years than I cared to remember since we last spoke. That was when I had done the cover art for “Rock and Roll Over”—KISS’ 5th album and their 2nd to go Platinum. So you can understand my surprise when Paul asked if I’d be interested in designing the cover art for KISS’ first studio album in 11 years—which Paul himself was producing.

That’s when I started remembering how exciting it was the first time around, to have been involved in that fast-paced world of entertainment and music. For me it had been a far cry from doing the corporate logos, magazine and book covers I had been working on at the time. An “edgy” job for me then was doing a spread for High Times (yep, they’ve been around for a while)! I’ve always enjoyed the fact that doing what I do has enabled me to straddle many different design worlds, from the fairly straight to the totally off-the-wall. I always tried to say “yes” to just about anyone who was adventurous enough, and had the vision to see how having me design for them could work to their advantage. At any rate I had said “yes”to KISS the first time around (even though I had no idea what I was doing), so of course I again said yes to Paul. We agreed to meet when he returned at the conclusion of their South American tour.

Much to my surprise the “Rock and Roll Over” cover had in recent years become one of the most—if not the most—talked about piece of art in my portfolio. It was a little bewildering to me how over the years that cover had become an icon for this iconic group. I’ve been contacted by more people about my KISS artwork in the past 6 or 7 years than in all the years prior, and more than any other piece I’ve ever done including the New York Knicks logo. So the expectations for this new art I was to work on were quite high.

Next: the new cover design revealed.

(Not Too Much) Lost in Translation

I recently worked with Art Director Maili Holiman designing the opening page and titles for an article about the Somali pirates for the July issue of Wired Magazine (it might take a few moments for this article to load). No sooner had I finished doing the five pieces of art than I was contacted by Wired Italia, who asked me to recreate all the art I had done—but in Italian. Recreating designs with different wording can be challenging as my designs are usually based on the specific letters I’m dealing with, how they relate to one another, how many words there are, etc. The main piece was particularly challenging as the design was more complicated than the others. But at least the main word kept the cap “C” which otherwise would have posed a major problem:

After dealing with the the opener the four other heads were slightly less problematic to deal with:

I don’t know, but it seems to me in some cases the Italian version might even work slightly better than it’s English counterpart. I had never before dealt with this type of problem, but can only guess that with our shrinking world we’ll be seeing more and more of this type of crossover.

Dept. of Redundancy Dept.

I haven’t yet repeated a posting on a particular project, but I felt I needed to do it just this once. I wanted to show off the actual cover that I designed for “America Swings“. I designed it to be an actual tin-lithograph like the toys that were produced by companies like Chein and Marx back in the 20th Century. I was absolutely thrilled with the job that Taschen publishing did with fabricating and putting together this cover from the quality of the tin-lithography to the American flag background fabric. Click on the bottom image below for an even better view.