Music of Life T-Shirt
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Let me know if you would like one of these shirts, and if I get enough requests I will do a reprint. To get the latest news on new shirts and to avoid missing out next time, simply email me and I will add you to my mailing list or you can follow me on Twitter or Facebook or even subscribe to the RSS feed of this site.
No doubt you will already have a good knowledge of the Music of Life record label, but I feel props have to be given to the man behind most of the artwork for the label, including their iconic logo, Chris Barnardo. He kindly gave me a bit of insight into the creation process:
Simon and I had been friends for a few years and he knew that I did a fair amount of freelance design to supplement my salary (I worked as a designer up in London) and was thinking of starting up my own design company (Designer’s Inc.). He asked me if I could design a logo for him. We met in his flat in Wanstead, London E11, and he told me what he planned for the label.
I didn’t know much about hip hop, but I got the idea of what he was talking about. He had done a design which was a circle of text with a ECG heart beat trace (PQRST complex it is called actually) inside it and said that he liked that (we both agreed it looked cool), but didn’t know about the writin round the edge.
He said that there would be loads of record sleeves to design and that this was just the beginning. To be fair as a designer, you hear a lot of this sort of talk when people are asking you to help them out at the start of something and need your help. Mind you I had always wanted to design record sleeves, and as Simon was my friend I was willing to give it a go.
I looked at the heart beat pulse for a long time but couldn’t make it work. I tinkered with the text in a circle and got to like it more and more, especially in the block format plain and reversed out like it ended up. So the hunt was on for a suitably strange looking icon that could go in the middle of the circle and not be overpowered by the heavy surround. I had for years been a fan of the Dover Book series. I had a Dover Book of ancient signs and symbols which even then was dog-eared and well worn.
Whenever I needed inspiration I thumbed through it and tried to see if any ancient symbols unlocked my thinking or inspired me. I love alchemy symbols and tried a few of those (Later to become my logo for Designer’s Inc., but it was something in the section of ancient deities that really caught my eye.
You’ll be amazed to hear that I have just reached under my desk and pulled out the exact same book and thumbed to that exact page, Page 29, where amongst the other North American Indian Symbolic Gods and Deities is No 77 ANIMIKI – The God of Storm and Thunder. I knew immediately that this was what I was looking for.
I redrew it a little to thicken up the lines and make it a little bit more modern, self assured and less fussy (although it was basically the same) and that was it. Well apart from choosing the colours. I can’t remember whether I presented a few different colour versions to Simon, or just went straight in with only one. I know I did present a version with the original heartbeat on it. As usual Simon quickly knew what he liked and didn’t and the heartbeat was quickly dispatched in favour of the Storm God.
I designed a record label, the headed note paper and the various other bits of stationary that a company needs. For a while we toyed with the idea of setting up a design company called “Design of Life”, but that never came to more than a logo (now lost) and instead I left my job and set up Designer’s Inc.
I went on to design pretty much every one of MoL’s single and album sleeves and many of their press adverts. We had some really nice covers, we had some technical breakthroughs (the first to really use desktop publishing to completely design and set a record sleeve) but mostly it was just what I did, designing covers with the normal brief “Let’s do something different”.
Simon’s keen eye and unswerving support, but unfailing doggedness to get it right if he didn’t like it and all mostly on very tight budgets.
Chris Barnardo – June 2010
About the Shirts
The shirts are Fruit of the Loom, Black, Super Premium heavyweight, loose fit 205gsm, with a 2 colour screen-printed front.
Payment can be made securely online with a credit card via Paypal.
Let me know if you would like one of these shirts, and if I get enough requests I will do a reprint. To get the latest news on new shirts and to avoid missing out next time, simply email me and I will add you to my mailing list or you can follow me onTwitter or Facebook or even subscribe to the RSS feed of this site.
For any further enquiries, please contact me
