no depression: its all a best of

Jesse Marinoff Reyes:

I wrote at length on the work of Grant Alden on his essential document of American music, No Depression magazine—both as designer and art director for its covers. But this was an entire magazine he was doing remember, and much more. It spawned t-shirts and compilation cds—and two collections of its writing which I had the privilege to design the covers for . In the immediate aftermath of the magazine’s demise—at the hands of the economy, ad revenue dried-up as it did for magazines large and small across the spectrum—it managed an all too brief comeback for three issues as a “bookazine” hybrid (for the same publisher of the second “best of” collection), the second issue of which I designed the cover for. Not to mention over the course of the magazine’s initial run, I was pulled in by Alden to design two feature spreads …

So here is Grant Alden as art director of me—his onetime influence and ongoing cohort in crime.

JMR Design

For a feature spread (my second for the publication) on Billy Bragg my aim was to distill Bragg’s long-time affinity for left-leaning political statements—both in his work and in his life—as I thought it summed-up the man and his work more succinctly than just taking a random element from his current album as a point of departure (unless of course he’d chosen a radical shift from his own track record, like becoming a pro-Thatcherite!).

To wit, I sought to bring together historical elements from Labor—crafting in essence a protest placard. The typography is consciously large in concert with that notion (in particular the turn-of-the-last-century typeface used for his name, an evocation of the “Joe Hill” era of international labor design treatments). Sadly, this was done for No Depression’s last issue, just when I thought I was getting the hang of it.

No Depression, No. 75, May-June, 2008 issue
Double-page feature spread, “Billy Bragg”
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Art Director: Grant Alden

JMR Design

Finally, in No Depression’s brief afterlife as a “bookazine” (for three issues) published by the University of Texas Press—the same publisher as the second collection—Alden commissioned me to design a wrap-around cover for its second issue (or in the greater chronology, No. 77, for those of you keeping score at home). The bookazine editions tended to be more thematic than the magazine had been, with more of an emphasis on articles relating to one another in some fashion. So, my assignment was rendered under the sobriquet “instruments of change.”

Similarly to the Saul Bass-inspired cover for The Best of No Depression collection from a few years earlier, I used another mid-century design influence that Alden and I admire, using the jazz album designs of Reid Miles for Blue Note Records as a jumping off point. Simply put, treating it much the same as a “compilation record” along similar conceptual lines (it was in fact an Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers album that provided particular food for thought).

No Depression, No. 77, Spring, 2009 issue
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Art Director: Grant Alden

Here is the wrap-around effect.