Friday, October 17, 2008

TRAP THEM Designs







Trap Them are a band that I've had the pleasure of working with over a few different projects, helping to shape their visuals and, well, sell some shirts, too. Trap Them's previous shirts and records were designed by the great Justin Bartlett, whose work reminds me of the classic Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, a book that has illustrations that gave me chills as a child. The band wanted to keep with occasional inverted crosses and sacrilegious imagery, so I worked on a logo that featured an inverted "t" in the center and came up with one of my favorite logos that I've done. Once I saw it printed I realized it was a bit too close to the original Tragedy logo, so I made a few adjustments when preparing it for their Seance Prime EP and shirts. 

The three letters "T-R-A" in sequence always end up looking like that damn (awesome) Tragedy logo! I don't know if it's just the way I write it or if that image is in the back of my mind pushing the pen in that direction or what... With Trap Them I think it ended up looking unique enough, but the logo I did a few years back for a band called Betrayed looks nearly identical out of the corner of your eye. When they put that logo on their black and white CD cover, it tricked me half the time I walked by it at a record store!

All of the Trap Them designs have been really fun and I hope that we continue to work together over the years. Most recently, I've been very satisfied with The Void and Hidden, their most recent shirt designs. For The Void, I created crop circle inspired geometric shapes in Freehand, shattered glass and dots with PITT pens, then text and textures by printing and scanning, finally assembling it all in Photoshop. With Hidden, Trap Them guitarist suggested a design inspired by a laserdisc cover of The Hidden, a film I've never seen but stars Kyle MacLachlan so it's got that going for it. We used that as our basis, added the ubiquitous skull and took it from there. The type is altered Alte Haas Grotesque, a font I'm currently obsessed with and pops up in quite a lot of my recent design work. 

Trap Them are a great band, they have improved vastly every time I've seen them. From the first time in a Louisville living room to most recently in Oklahoma City, they had become a completely different machine. I'm sure now with new drummer Mike Justian they will be even more intense. Their new album, Seizures In Barren Praise, is out now on Deathwish and is not to be missed.

1 comment:

skybenson said...

i was searching for the auxiliary records website and ended up here. been a big fan of your bands and even more so your design work. really cool to hear you go through your process.

your buddy kentwofour just did my band gray ghosts last shirt design. check us out www.myspace.com/grayghostatl