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Challenge: Nitro Records was started by the lead singer for The Offspring, Dexter Holland, as a vehicle for him to release music by young punk bands who showed promise. As punk was becoming a hotter prospect, every record label was looking for a way to create the next Green Day. When I started working with AFI, one of Nitrošs young bands, they were an extremely energetic, adolescent hardcore band. They wrote songs about the usual subjects conflicts with parents and jocks and the other difficulties of high school life. As they began to evolve and mature a little, it became obvious to everyone involved that they wanted to be more than a generic hardcore band. Davey Havoc, the singer, was experimenting with more melodies in his songwriting, and the bandšs sound was changing and becoming more refined. While the cut-and-paste xerox album artwork had worked for their old sound, the new aesthetic demanded more sophistication and introspection. We had to create a visual equivalent to their new musical direction dark and brooding without a total loss of of their original sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek wit. Solution: After considering a number of photography-based approaches, we started to lean towards illustration, as we felt it would give us more flexibility to construct the visual world the albums would inhabit. We aimed for a combination of Edward Gorey, Nightmare Before Christmas, and Warner Brothers cartoons. We reviewed a number of illustrators and finally settled on Alan Forbes. Alan had made a name for himself doing concert posters during the low-brow art renaissance, along with Frank Kozik, Chris Cooper, and others. His style of bold lines and bright colors would work for the woodcut-derived images we were planning, and his drawing had enough whimsy that it wouldnšt seem like we were taking ourselves too seriously. We conceived images that matched the titles of the album and met with the illustrator to discuss our goals for the final piece haunting, but with an acknowledgement there was a little fun to be had with all this darkness. We designed a new logo for the band that better fit their emerging image, incorporating some calligraphy to further dignify and lend sophistication to the packaging. With the two subsequent albums, we continued to use the same illustration style, moving towards a more cartoonish depiction of the next scenes. We focused on Halloween imagery and chose specific images as icons from the illustrations, ultimately ending up with a suite of album covers, t-shirts, and stickers that presented a unified and marketable image of the band. AFI has become far and away the best seller for Nitro Records, becoming one of the most popular of the second generation of commercially accepted punk bands. They have been featured repeatedly on the WARP tour, toured with Rancid and The Offspring, and received write-ups in Rolling Stone and other mainstream music media. They have recently released their first major label album, which has already gone gold.
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