Sage Francis 3.0: an always-evolving logo

Artist, record label boss and rapper Sage Francis has just unveiled his new logo, over 20 years since I first fell in love with his records, 18 years since I did the biggest art project of my life on his work, 16 years since I did a piece of art that wasn’t meant to be a logo but became one, 17 years since I did his first proper ‘new logo’, and ten years since I designed him another ‘new logo’. Like the artist himself, this is a logo — and a relationship — that doesn't stay still!

We never sat down to do a logo, to brainstorm or sign an NDA or moodboard or A/B test or anything else. It’s been a fully organic journey. The first one was actually a piece specially created for the 2007 Manhattan outing of our big Sage-inspired show, If A Girl Writes Off The World (a pre-Adobe Dreamweaver-built site will open up. I built it myself and it’s so poignantly 2007). It was picked up and put onto some of the hoodies in Sage’s Strange Famous merch range — best-sellers at that. Detailed and writhing, it was made with a very fine Nikko-G nib and black ink. The original is actually very small, and framed in our hallway.

The second was kind of accidental as it was made for the cover of Sage’s 2007 album Human The Death Dance. It just kind of…started to get used on things, posters, ads, posts and merch. In the way that a logo does, I suppose. Made with an inkpen and nib, it featured sad faces and a minimal slope, just designed to peer over the shoulder of the man himself, next to a watermark-like Death. With hindsight, it was flimsy and odd, but then again…unlike a lot of my formal client commisssions, I hadn’t ‘sat down to design a logo’.

The album cover. Which was almost…

…this one instead.

The one that came after that was also for an album, 2014’s Copper Gone. It formed part of a single piece of ink-on-paper art but once again lived a life of its own, and served as Sage’s identity for the ten years prior the current one. I almost can’t believe myself the huge spans of time I’m casually throwing around here, by the way — but those are the dates, and this is the longevity of it all.

Again if I’d known at the time that this would be deployed in the way it was, there are things I’d have changed — but would it have improved anything? Not sure. Really not sure, but at some point someone filled it in and made it solid — which wasn’t a cool move, and around that time I began thinking, I really need to do that properly, or scrap it and do the whole thing again.

Eventually I did. I can’t remember whether I just did it and sent it to Sage with a note saying ‘this really needed doing’, or whether he asked — it doesn’t matter — but the outcome is this one. This time I *did* sit down to ‘make a logo’ from the roots put down by the Copper Gone iteration, but clean and clear. I faffed and tweaked and moved vector points and smoothed out bezier curves then undid it all, and repeat, eventually creating so many versions I think we actually really should have done some A/B testing. But there it is.

There are still things I’d change, even now, and it may or may not serve for another ten years. But I like the organic and slightly clumsy way all of these were done. They sort of ‘happened’, which is very different from the art-directed, purposeful, accountable way I do my other work.

The final. I think. Not sure. I like it. Sage likes it. But do I like one of the other versions more? We can always use one of those…can’t we…I think. We fly in the face of your Logo Rules, sir!

When Sage posted it to the fans, most people just loved it and started slapping money on the counter for the T shirt. Someone said ‘Francis’ reads as a completely different word. Someone else said having seen it they’re now expecting a country album (which I applauded).

I still look at it and see a curve I would change, bits I’d move, and I stare at it till I’m logo-blind. But honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thanks Sagey for the wholesomely organic way we do things, every time.

(If you want to read more, there’s a bunch of historic blogs here).

P.S.; this one was a wild card, and Did Not Make It. Nor shall it ever…I think…

All The Impossible Things

Published this week - on the same day as 'Out To Get You' - was this beautiful debut novel by Lindsay Lackey, whose cover I worked on last year.

I met Lindsay for a pint/cupatea in London in May, and I learned all about the mammoth effort involved in taking a book from idea in the middle of the night to a published reality. We all see best-selling books which seem to just pop out fully formed - the Stephen Kings, Dan Browns, the Andy McNabbs and Sophie Kinsellas - the next one in the series hitting shelves with what looks like an easy regularity.

But it was probably JK Rowling who first drew the curtain back on the enormous amount of work and dedication - you might even say belligerence - that turns a book from a nice aspiration to a saleable product. Her story of writing in an Edinburgh café with baby in tow, making a single coffee last for hours, have passed into legend and become part of the canon of literary history. That she then had the first HP novel rejected so many times is also part of that story, and since then, story after story has appeared of novels being written on buses, after the kids have gone to bed, between shifts and after class. Lindsay's was no different - a long, patient road to finishing a WHOLE book, then finding an agent, then the journey to publishing.

Lindsay's currently hash tagging 'NotMyImpossible', encouraging people to share their own stories of a struggle to overcome something - the thing in their lives that seemed impossible to build, achieve, overcome or solve, starting with her own history of a jaw condition that left her in daily, almost unbearable pain. Throughout it, and despite it, she wrote her novel anyway, and little by little - 'little' being sugary physiotherapy and dietary changes - she came to where she is now: pain free, and with a first published novel on the shelves.

The story itself is "a tearful, heartfelt, hope-filled tale of an eleven-year-old girl navigating the foster care system in search of a place to call home. Lackey’s soaring debut reminds us that family can be found in surprising places and love can achieve the impossible" (borrowing from the perfectly summary by Goodreads' Hannah Greendale). The cover needed to be magical, aspirational, but with a hint of the serious nature of the story arc. Many versions of the cover lettering were created, a mixture of letters created on my iPad with Procreate, and ink on paper solutions. The final, star-scattered one seen here is a combination of 'real' ink with digital stars, laid over designer Elizabeth Clark's shimmering background imagery. Just how many versions there were I lost count of - but I like to offer PLENTY of options!

You can see the finished book, printed CMYK on pearlescent paper, at the bottom. 

The work was commissioned by Elizabeth Clark, Macmillan USA.

And you can buy the book in the UK here, or in the US here.

Fangs to Amelia!

Over the last 18 months I've been redesigning the books in the Amelia Fang range - the best-selling children's stories about little vampire Amelia, written by Laura Ellen Anderson.

Delacorte Press (part of PenguinRandomHouse) couldn't have chosen a better pairing; pumpkin-loving Laura and her little goth characters in their Halloween-all-the-time world, and me with my scratchy pens, love of ink and my leaning towards the murkier side of things. I would have DEVOURED these books as a 10 year old - well, I love them now!

Laura's books are already well known so this was a slightly unusual job for me; normally, I'm illustrating the entire cover, and even the insides of a book. Amelia Fang has a wide and very eager following, so it felt like something of a responsibility to create her 'new clothes'.

Aside from Laura's characters, everything on the covers needed a re-design. The first job was to create from scratch the logo for the book range. This came very naturally; all spikes and jaunty angles, I drew up seven different options in my sketchbook, and transferred those to my iPad Pro where I could put some meat on their bones with my Apple Pencil. Normally, this would be done with ink on paper, but since I was working in Edinburgh at the time, it had to be done in my hotel room and on lunch breaks, so the iPad was my heroic little chum. As it turned out, it was the perfect choice of hardware, allowing for fast changes-of-mind and quick erasing on the go with no need to fret about leaky ink in the suitcase.

Once I was back in the studio, art director Katrina picked out a few for further development and we placed these in situ with some of Laura's characters. MANY ideas for the cover were generated:

The final chosen was my favourite - always a satisfying outcome - the one where the ends of the letters hint at bones, pointing jauntily upward while warning us off with the twin pointy spikes of the As, held together at the top by a tiny bat. We worked on it and fine-tuned until it was just...imperfectly perfect!

Curly bits here? Or there? how many thorns or no thorns? Ink splat or bat? What sort of Es?

The books titles needed hand-rendering too, along with a new identity for Laura's name: all had to sit together comfortably in Laura's gently spooky world. We decided the whole thing needed tying together with some ink-soaked, dramatic fantasy skies...which DID require litres of ink on acres of paper! (And back to multi-coloured fingertips) - here are just some of them:

The final touch was the moon. Initially created with ink, bleach and collage, the enormous glowing moon was placed behind Laura's characters to anchor them under the new series title, the inky skies studded with bleachy stars:

...add some spider's webs to the corners, and there it was!

The final covers consist of millions of layers consisting of scans of multiple ink-made skies and stars, - the moon along is 5 layers deep! - along with he little shadows and details in the characters. If ever a job required Extreme Layer Discipline - labelling, colouring and folding layers - this was it!|

'The Barbaric Ball' and 'The Unicorns of Glitteropolis' were published on 30th July 2019, with the next two - 'The Rainbow Rangers' and 'The Memory Thief' (with RIOTOUS colours on the cover!) being published in March 2020.

Thank you Laura for trusting me with your colours and Katrina at Delacorte for having the vision to put us together! And Laura - hurry up and write some more, will you? :D

Buy the Amelia Fang books HERE