AlphaDesigner Blogue

All designers hate their clients, don’t they? This is something like an axiom in our profession. Of course it’s not true. If you hate all your clients, you should simply quit, design is not for you. It’s as simple as that. Many people make their first steps in this profession perceiving themselves as artists rather than true designers. While there’s a huge difference between creating for yourself and creating for other people. Your clients have demands and that’s the way it should be. Compared to what some people call free art, design is a compromise. The final product always reflects a balance between different expectations. When the compromise is disrupted, you end up with a crappy product, regardless of who’s to blame – the over-inflated ego of the designer or the stubbornness of the client.

Of course this explanation is rather long and doesn’t sound as bombastic as the first sentence, hence when we decide to have fun, we prefer the short form and we love to call our clients stupid and stubborn. And this short movie can give you a perfect (and of course funny) example how far we can go when some client finally manages to drive us mad. Because no matter how diplomatic and understanding we are, sometimes there are people whose demands are absolutely ridiculous.

I had this idea about Atlas from a very long time but I could find the right model for it. I wanted to get out of the usual cliché – the middle aged beefed up superhero that holds a globe above his head. I needed another type of man – one that looks mature enough but also has something childish in his appearance. And so I came across that portrait by Patrick Lentz:

Michael -18, originally uploaded by Violentz.

I wrote him a letter and he agreed to let me use it. That was almost a year ago. I think I started in January, I made the cutout and then I stopped for some reason… I had other work to do and it was quite distracting. Then in April I continued painting various backgrounds and sets but as it happens usually – I ran out of inspiration. So this artwork had to wait a bit longer than usual. It was not until July that I seriously started to gather my thoughts and in addition, I had a quite relaxed agenda this summer and I was able to dedicate it as much time as I needed. I completed it 11 days ago. More about the idea behind it can be found on the original Flickr page and in this small set which shows some work-in-progress details.

I downloaded almost all the songs from this album weeks before the official release. Sorry dear. I wanted them so badly I turned the whole wide web upside down. I also downloaded all the b-sides. Last but not least – I downloaded the additional free song. So I ended up with a collection of 11 songs. That means a lo-o-ot of guilty consciousness. But it also means that I have a quite clear idea about the album itself. I like Ruby Blue a lot and as every other Moloko fan I expected quirky stuff again. However, Overpowered sounds completely different, so different that it needs some time for adjustment. Perhaps this is why almost all the songs managed to leak prior to the official release. It’s a nice strategy to stifle the shock of the fanbase. So this is pop. Straight forwarded, fat, lush, shimmering, electronic pop. In a way, in its foundation, it reminds me on Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor. Only the span is a bit more wider – it borrows not just from the glamorous disco of the ’70s but also a lot from the euro-dance of the ’80s. I can almost hear Samantha Fox whistling from behind. Of course all these hooks are nicely wrapped in a tight synthetic package and glued with these fat blooby baselines we all love so much.

She may have gone mainstream with her music but speaking about the visual part, and there’s always a visual part with Róisín, she went far beyond any possible predictions. There’s something half funny and half bitter in the off-beat pop diva that looks like a Martian roaming the grey city streets. She’s not trying to impress people or something, she’s just herself. And it seems that nobody objects her right to be herself. But nobody seems quite impressed, too. She has to deal with all the mundane details of modern living and she has a job there on the scene, which is hard to do and takes a lot of her energy away – as the dripping sweat in the beginning of the Overpowered video suggests. That’s the appropriate image of the future pop star actually – music business isn’t about Moonwalkers any more, it’s about Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. And everybody’s taking part.