Over two decades of making electronic music, running record labels, designing records and occasionally deciding to throw the whole thing away and start again.
I've spent most of my career designing things because somebody needed them.
This is the other stuff.
For nearly twenty years I've been making and releasing electronic music as DFRNT and later Stillhead - and designing almost everything that surrounds it.
Identities, record sleeves, vinyl, CDs, websites, videos, merchandise and whatever else seemed like a good idea.
There was no client. No brief. No approval process.
I've designed the visual side of almost everything I've released.
DFRNT had its own identity, built around a deer emblem that gave the project a subtle Scottish connection. Later, Stillhead gave me the opportunity to start again.
Along the way I also created record labels including Echodub, Cut Records, and Brightest Dark Place, designing their identities and packaging releases for other artists as well as myself.
But I've never been particularly interested in making everything look the same.
The identity might provide a thread, but the records were where I got to play.
The music always came first. Then I got to decide what the thing I'd made should look like.
Each album could have its own visual character. The music gave me a starting point, and I could follow it into photography, illustration, typography or whatever felt right for that release.
Photography. Illustration. Typography. Texture. Fog. Huge blocks of colour.
If I liked something, I could try it.
Fading was probably one of the most complete physical releases I made as DFRNT.
The artwork expanded across a picture disc and a six-panel folding CD package, turning the release into something much more tangible than a thumbnail sitting beside a play button.
For Copenhagen, I drew an illustration based on a place I'd stayed in the city.
Nothing more strategic than that.
I liked the place. I liked the drawing.
So it became the record.
Out of the Loop was released in two parts, both built around a foggy, slightly mysterious visual world.
When I later brought the two parts together as a physical release, I designed it as a miniature double-vinyl album - two tiny vinyl-style CDs in their own inner sleeves inside a gatefold package.
Completely unnecessary.
Which is probably why I liked it.
One project might be built around an illustration. Another around photography. Another might be almost entirely typography.
Brightest Dark Place - the label I created alongside Stillhead - initially had a much more consistent photographic identity. Atmospheric images, restrained typography and a simple identity holding everything together.
Eventually even that loosened up.
It's a container for whatever I want to put into it.
And that's kind of the point.
After years as DFRNT, I'd reached the point where I wanted a clean start.
So after four albums, more than twenty EPs and years spent building an audience around the name, I did the commercially sensible thing.
I threw it away.
Stillhead was the reset.
In retrospect, it wasn't necessarily a brilliant decision from an audience point of view. Not everyone followed me across to the new name.
Apparently my carefully considered personal rebrand wasn't as important to them as it was to me.
But creatively, it gave me exactly what I wanted. A clean slate. And an excuse to design everything again.
Restraint & Reverb went somewhere completely different.
Big, unapologetic typography became the visual idea.
I released four singles ahead of the album, each using the same typographic approach, before bringing everything together for the full release.
Then I spent far too much money making it physical.
A double album on heavyweight coloured vinyl.
Yellow and orange.
Most of the visual work lived around the releases themselves, but occasionally an idea needed something else.
For Pounds of Gold, I combined footage shot by the vocalist with material filmed by a listener in Japan, editing the two together into a music video.
For a while I streamed music production on Twitch too, which inevitably resulted in me spending an unreasonable amount of time designing environments, overlays and graphics for something that was supposed to be about making music.
There have been websites, merchandise and assorted other experiments along the way too.
Mostly whatever the thing needed.
By the time I made A Real Piece of Work, generative AI had made it extremely easy to type some words into a box and receive something that could technically be called album artwork.
I considered it.
The album title had a deliberate double meaning: a collection of work, but also a description of a difficult person.
If I was going to call something A Real Piece of Work, using a generated image felt like taking the piss.
So I pen-and-inked a self-portrait instead, which became the cover.
I crowdfunded the physical release as a limited double gatefold vinyl edition.
And somebody bought the original drawing.
Which was nice!
I've been doing this alongside my actual design career for pretty much the same amount of time.
It has never had a design strategy. Nobody has ever asked me for a moodboard. There's no stakeholder approval, no user testing and absolutely no design system.
I make the music first. Then I work out what it should look like.
Sometimes that's photography. Sometimes illustration. Sometimes enormous type. Sometimes it means drawing my own face with a pen because using AI for an album called A Real Piece of Work felt like a poor choice.
There's no real commercial justification for most of it.
It's simply somewhere I can follow an idea because I like it.
And that's probably why I've kept doing it for so long.
The work here has always been personal, but it shares a thread with the rest of my practice: taking an idea from the first spark through to something tangible.
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