Visual Sampling: Tappin Gofton Go Geometric On Wild Beasts' New Album Sleeve

By the mid-'00s, music industry professionals and anyone with an opinion and a pen were predicting the death of the record. But, ever so slowly and with little fanfare, the record—that supreme musical artifact where art and commerce collide—made a comeback; and with it, a new era of album artwork was birthed. Across the pond, one design studio, Tappin Gofton, has been quietly creating some of the last decade's most dynamic album art.

Tappin Gofton co-founder Simon Gofton calls his company a “multidisplinary design studio.” With fingers in many pies, the two designers work on everything from art direction and branding to interactive design and publishing. But, the pair's album designs might just define their vision as a studio. Tappin Gofton's cover art for The Chemical Brothers albums We Are The Night and Push the Button, as well as Everything Everything's Kemosabe, in particular, are worthy of high praise. On them, analogue and digital, as well as past and present influences merge into art and design that is intensely current.

Tappin Gofton's latest creation is the album design and packaging for Wild Beasts' new album Present Tense. Collaborating with the band, and working from the conceptual starting point of “visual sampling,” Gofton and Mark Tappincreated a series of geometric patterns comprised of 16 equal segments into which they placed various images. The images, which range from found photographs to illustrations, appear across a series of sleeves; and each sleeve's pattern reveals a different section of the images for each release.

In a recent chat, Gofton explained the process behind the Wild Beasts album design, and how it needed to work across various other album campaign elements to fully express Present Tense's themes of “sex, death, birth, memory, betrayal, money, love and inheritance.”

Can you describe the process involved in making Wild Beasts' Present Tense album art? It seems that collage is very integral to what you do, especially on the Wild Beasts project, no?

Tappin Gofton: The process and the method for how we set about creating solutions for projects is pretty consistent and is primarily driven by a deep understanding of the client and the product. It’s this process and an attitude that means we don’t apply a generic, house-style to each project. We try to take an inherently artful approach to our commercial work and create solutions that transcend a particular style but yet remain contemporary, fresh, and relevant.

For the Wild Beasts, the band were keen for their artwork to be colorful, playful, humorous and have a sense of self-awareness. In their words, the new record “encompasses sex, death, birth, memory, betrayal, money, love and inheritance. It is a record taking in the passage from young manhood into becoming a bona fide 'Man', contrasting softness and toughness.”

They came to us because they were we're looking for someone who could either incorporate or interpret their references into a concise and instantly recognizable format which could span across releases.

So, how did you proceed from those notes? Fairly early on in the process and in an attempt to try and reflect the way in which the record was made—a kind of visual sampling if you like—it was agreed that the artwork should be made up of multiple images in some way. After looking at different ways to realize this basic idea, and with a lot of help and input from the band, we went about finding an individual image which would visually represent each track on the album. We then created a series of geometric patterns with 16 equal segments into which we could place the images. The exact same images are used across the series of sleeves with the patterns used to reveal different sections of the images for each release.

Did the internet impact how this physical artwork was produced?

Although we know and appreciate that our artwork will at some stage be disseminated into smaller constituent parts, and that it will be required for digital applications, we feel if the solution is strong enough and we can get it to work in its most simple form it will succeed on any level. As to the internet's effect on the art itself, theinternet as a tool obviously aided the design process but I'm not sure it inspired the artwork. I don't think that we once thought about the impact and influence of aesthetic trends on the internet in terms of our direction for the artwork. Where do the images come from? Are they found, or made to look like they're found, whether on cyberspace or in physical archival material?

The images come from a number of different sources including image libraries, the
personal archives of photographers either we or the band found, a commissioned band shoot, and illustrations we created ourselves.

Did this differ from processes used on other pieces/projects?

It's the first time we've used so many images from different sources in this way. Most commonly we're involved with the commissioning and subsequent art direction of a singular artist, be that a photographer, illustrator, or image maker.

How does physical, tangible art influence your digital approach to art and design?

The use of artwork is obviously now much more than just about an image on a CD cover. We really have to think more widely about how the artwork is used and seen. For us, this still requires that we create striking artwork, but it needs to be adaptable to other related campaign elements used in conjunction with the release of the record, be that on screen or otherwise. What are some of your graphic design influences both past and present?

There isn't a specific period of graphic design or, for that matter, any of the other visual arts that we always turn to for inspiration. We're just as likely to be influenced and inspired by work that is created by our contemporaries as we are by the work created by those who have gone before us. We have always loved record sleeves and continue to do so, and we were fortunate to begin our design careers when designing for the music industry was very creative and exciting. It was something that we had always wanted to do.

) To hear more from Wild Beasts' new album,

Present Tense

, head over to

Domino Record's site.

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