Short post: Know your stuff before the interview

At the age of 16, I was asked during a job interview, "What is the most important thing about consumerism?"

I asked, "What's consumerism?"

I didn't get the job. Lesson learned.

Album art that told a story (usually a scary one)

As a child, I loved thumbing through my father's record collection. He is a fan of blues and old-school hard rock, so mixed in with BB King and Johnny Winter I would also find Blue Oyster Cult, 70s-era Judas Priest, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Nazareth, White Witch, and The Who.

The album art to which I was most attracted was anything that was a bit dark and ominous. You could gaze not at the album cover, but INTO the album cover, finding your own story within. Usually it wasn't too pretty.

Consider Priest's Sad Wings of Destiny cover or Rainbow's Rising album art. All beautiful and scary at the same time.

I would spend hours with these records, studying and pondering the story behind each one. The old building on Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti and Alice's green face when he Goes to Hell.

Throughout my dad's entire collection, no cover had the impact on me like the Medusa album from Trapeze.

This cover art literally scared the crap outta me.

While older folks who gaze at the cover for the first time might not see any reason for such a dreaded feeling, you have to look at it through the eyes of a 5 or 6 year-old kid.

First of all, the album is titled Medusa. Even at that young age I remember seeing a painting of the beheaded snake-haired woman with a look of anger and terror frozen in her eyes and open mouth. Just the word Medusa was scary enough to me.

Then we have the cover art: a stained glass horror. Triangular shapes piecing together to form an angry face, seemingly screaming at another face below. The angry face became a character all its own to me, and not one that I would ever want to meet. It embodied nothing but anger, highlighted in its eyes and cartoonishly crooked mouth.

The emotion I took away from the front cover made the back cover all the more disturbing. The art work appeared the same, just a bit more ethereal. Within the swirling colors, I could make out another face showing off what appears to be a smile and a wink. The happy emotion is mixed in a surrounding atmosphere of new age, storms, and fire. Any peaceful offerings hinted at on the back cover is a facade.

As terrible as I make it sound, the entire cover, both front and back, are genuinely beautiful expressions Trapeze's music. There is a story in there and my past 6 year-old self looked hard for it and loved every minute of it.

Even if it did give me nightmares.

My first frightening logo

I was a very visual kid, and certain images would burn themselves into my head, terrifying me as I tried to sleep at night. The first image I remember having this effect on me was the logo for the movie The Shining.

Saul Bass created an image that was equally scary and haunting as the movie itself (at least to a 7 year-old). If I had to point out the most frightening aspect of The Shining's logo, it would have to be the eyes of the...boy? Ghost? Who or what is that individual trapped within the shapes of the waved letters? It didn't matter. To me, the image did its job by solidifying the idea that The Shining was a scary freaking movie.

As I look at the logo today, it makes me wish more film studios would identify their movies with a genuine piece of worked art instead of whatever system font is available.

If I see one more comedy using Gill Sans Ultra Bold for their "logo", I'm gonna puke glass.

My first love (for a logo)

The first logo I remember attracting my attention was Mobil Oil's. There was a Mobil Oil station in my grandmother's small town of Lakin, KS, and every time we went to visit I would look out for their faded logo on the front of the small brick building.

Why did this particular logo call to me for a passing-by eyefull? Although the red "o" is the obvious focal point within the Mobil logo, I remember really being infatuated with the logo's blue.

Blue to me was the color the working man. It was the color of the gas attendent's jumpsuits, the color of their garage rags, and even the color of some of the beat up Chevy and Ford trucks parked haphazardly all over the gravel parking lot.

I also can't deny that the color combination of red and blue reminded me of the small plastic toys my mom would buy me at the local ALCO store. If that was the simple explanation for my liking of the Mobil logo, such a cause is unsurprising to me. I was, and still am, a toy geek.

Even as I see the logo today, the direct simplicity of the letters along with its iconic focal "o" is still a thing of beauty. No frills, no Photoshop bevels, and you know it when you see it.

Thank you, Mobil logo, for being the possible first steps into my love for design.