Goat Collective had asked ourselves to do the music for their exhibition on the opening night, which gave us the opportunity to represent Jarg People for the first time in front of numerous people. Therefore I thought it would be a good opportunity to use this event as a small project for myself and jarg. We wanted to able to represent ourselves correctly to the audience by show casing our individual interests as a collective by playing our favourite genres of music and by also displaying our own unique graphic design work with the use of prints and cassettes that we aim to produce.
We had a few Meetings discussing out angle for disposable society
As GOAT collective were picking up momentum and getting there name out there for this event, we were luckily mentioned in an article that was promoting the Disposable Society event. The first instance of our Design/Music group being mentioned online. Quite bizarre.
In our first meeting together as a group we decided that we needed to change our identity as a collective. We were not keen anymore on the hand drawn elements that we mockup for the Dr. Me brief. They were temporary anyhow, but we hadn't updated it since. After discussing what direction to go in, we all decided that we wanted to stick with a font/typeface for our name. We wanted a strong direction and to have something consistent. We all felt that with a hand drawn typeface it comes across as somewhat unprofessional and un-serious. Everyone wants to be represented as a legitimate group / label and house typefaces are needed to be used on releases/projects in order to stand out.
After a long time trying out new fonts we ended up being satisfied with a typeface from The Designers Foundry called ATC Harris. We all love mono spaced typefaces because of the modern digital aesthetic that they bring across and we thought that they would be perfect for our label/group.
After the logo was sorted we all decided on what cassettes we wanted and how many were needed. We all agreed on recording our own mixes and then selling at least 4 cassettes with the mixes on at the event.
This is my order below.
I started creating my playlist in Itunes of the songs that I had recently been listening to.
I recorded my mixtape using my Roland sampler, which I planned to use live for the Disposable Society Event.
AS OF LATE VOL. 1
When it came to designing my mixtape I came up with the name AS OF LATE. I came up with this nifty little name quite quickly. I wanted to start a series of mixes and use this chance to create the first one. I called it AS OF LATE because the songs I included on my tape were all tracks that I had been listening to recently, or tracks I had been playing as of lately. Therefore It was called AS OF LATE. This name is quite convenient because being based around the songs that I regularly listen to means collating tracks into a playlists for mixtapes is easy.
THE DESIGN
I didn't want to spend a lot of time on designing my tapes seeing as the exhibition was happening on the upcoming weekend. Since I had a library of my own photography I decided to delve into it and use my own images. I tried using 35mm images from my trip to Italy but none of them really suited of fitted with the cool music vibe that I was trying to present. There were no other images on my laptop that I had not already used for other projects so I was stuck for a little while. Until I looked on my old external hardrive. I discover some old scanned in 35mm positives that I took on my 35mm Nikon. There was a weird glitchy purple image and I loved how it looked. I knew that the Calibre type I had put together would look great over the top of it. I still wasn't sure why the image was purple, because I can't remember if I had edited it or not. However it presented the right mood I was looking for. Seeing as my mix featured mainly rap & slowed down sourthern hip-hop, the purple actually fitted in well because it's associated with drinking lean, which is what a lot of southern rappers drink.
I found another old image from a trip to RAF cosford of a plane turbine. I loved the grainy textured so I included it on the backside of the sleeve.
Here is my final design. All of the JARG guys agreed on placing out logo on the left of the designs, so it could be seen on the back of all the cassette cases.
My finished tapes!
The clear tapes I ordered look great with the pink letters I have drawn. I decided to use pink because it matches my purple cover design. The tapes were made in true DIY fashion by printing them off on my own printer and cutting them with my own guillotine.
Screen Printing
Harry had produced a small logo of 6 abstract shapes that represented the 6 members of the group. I had mentioned to everyone that I was going to be producing t-shirts and wanted a graphic to use, so Harry had sent me his design and I placed it together with our new logo and exposed it onto a fabric screen.
Setting up the screen for printing t-shirts took so long. I needed to make sure that the portable screen printing bed would print correctly onto the left side of the t-shirts, which is the area where the t-shirt pocket would be if it had one. This area of the t-shirts were chosen since the design was only small and minimal, placing it on the centre of the t-shirts would of looked out of place and silly.
The JARG letters and logo eventually started to bleed after a few t-shirts had been screen printed, which was quite annoying since I didn't have many shirts left to print. To fix this problem, I quickly cleaned the screen and rub gently in circular motions on both side using paper towels.
Here are all of the T-shirts that I had printed.
Happy with how they turned out, I managed to print some real crisp looking logos out onto them.
Our Set up at Northern Monk Brewery
EVALUATION
This was only a small brief that involved making a couple of designs for a mixtape and a t-shirt, however I did value a lot from the processes involved. I developed my fabric screen printing skills once again. When I printed my J Dilla t-shirts I had used a lot of space in the textiles studio. Therefore I had learned my lesson and stuck to a smaller section by using a portable screen printing bed.
We really prepared for this event as we
had printed out a two metre flag to promote ourselves. I had also printed and
contributed a short run of t-shirts and we each managed to design our own mix
tapes to sell, which helped create a decent stall with a various amount of
items. However we only sold a couple of items. But because of this we learned
what to do in similar situations in the future, we later realised that if it
was during the daytime that more people would pay attention to the content we
had and be more interested in purchasing something. When people are out in the
evening at a place that sells alcohol, then there more likely to spend their
money on drinks.
Each of us had turns at playing the music for the event,
everybody in Jarg mixed tunes, whereas I brought along my sampler and played
tracks off of that. It was my First time mixing live on my sampler too, so I
gained some insight on how to use the hardware live as well. On the whole it
was a great turn out and very beneficial for us to learn how to do things
better the next time we are doing an event. The members of goat were
overwhelmed by how many people were there and did a brilliant job at organising
the whole thing. Very grateful to have been a part of it.
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