Halo by Kevin May

Author:Kevin May
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803813028
Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing
Published: 2022-08-26T03:29:48+00:00

Richard Smith (USA), art designer at Area

My first job out of school was working for a guy called Peter Saville, who was famous for doing Joy Division and New Order.

In the late 1980s, Anton came to Peter Saville to do his book, ‘Famouz Photographs 1975-1988’, his first, and somehow that landed on my plate to do.

It was a labour of love for him and for me. I obviously had sort of admired all of his photos for years. So he and I sort of struck up a relationship, and I basically helped him put that book together.

In 1989, my then-wife Cara and I decided to leave Peter Saville and set up our own business, Area.

We were out with Anton just after his book had been published, celebrating, and he said he was working on the new Depeche Mode single, ‘Personal Jesus’.

I said to him, “Well, let me know if you need any help with putting the stuff together.” And so sure enough, about a week or so later, he called me and asked me to help him with this cover. That was the first thing that I started doing with him for Depeche.

We helped sort out the design of the whole package.

He painted this piece of artwork, and he had taken some photos in Milan, so really it was just a matter of helping him put it all together and design the whole thing.

Back in those days, there were a plethora of different formats to make, and then you know advertising, and blah, blah, blah.

What that essentially meant was that he handed over those basic assets to us, and then we helped put it all together and then designed the packaging for every sort of format and all the advertising, working with the record company.

He created all those pieces for ‘Personal Jesus’: the lettering and the painting of the cross.

I seem to remember that one of the challenges we had with that was working across multiple formats, because everything had to be locked in.

It wasn’t like we could move things around, so that was a bit of an issue initially for ‘Violator’, but fast-forward to ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’, we would ask him to make an alphabet for us and then we would create a typeface, which enabled us to make merchandising using the lettering and anything else we wanted to.

We had Anton write Depeche Mode in bold as our typeface, and we were able to manipulate it. If we wanted to have the album title bigger, we could do that.

We didn’t have to do any sort of cut-and-paste job. It was much easier. But that was sort of how that worked.

I don’t remember specifically what was the motivation for the ‘Personal Jesus’ cover, but I think he was playing off of Martin Gore’s obsession with religion and sex and all those sorts of things. Back then, pretty much every song Martin wrote about was some sort of nod to that.

Anton just had a simple idea: “‘Personal Jesus’? Let’s paint a cross!” So, okay, that is the idea.

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