Archive for September, 2008

Steve Jobs recently unveiled Apple’s new iPod Nano. The forth generation Nano is supposed to be the thinnest yet, with clever new functions such as ’shake to shuffle’ which basically shuffles your songs at the flick of a wrist. It also boasts a ‘genius’ feature which claims to be able to find similar songs in your music library that sound great together. Perhaps these machines really are becoming self aware, although I’m guessing that if you think Cliff and The Ting Tings sit well together your going to be disappointed!

These modifications and tweaks are a world away from the original idea behind a portable digital audio player. Who would have thought that the vision of a 23 year old Kane Kramer would go on to sell over 160 million units for Apple alone. The British inventors’ designs back in 1979 set out to revolutionise the music industry and went on to become the blue print for what we now know as the MP3 player.

The original idea involved using telephone lines to distribute the music, naturally this would have resulted in an analog sound as this was many years before the internet was available. The device stored just 3.5 minutes of music onto a chip. However, in 1988 with the patents not being renewed the technology became public property and the rest, as they say, is history.

Apple recently recognised Kane Kramer for his inventorship and now he now acts as an expert consultant. Small change considering Apple have made billions of dollars from iPod sales.

The sketch for Kramer’s music player bares a striking resemblance to the original iPod. Next week drawings of flying cars!

The notion of digital onscreen graphics (web) replacing printed media is not a new one. However, the idea of books making way for digital readers sends a shiver down your spine. Although there are other models on the market, the Sony Reader seems to have drawn a considerable amount of media attention of late.

There are obvious benefits to owning a digital ‘reader’ not least the fact that they can hold up to 160 eBooks. Imagine all of those empty bookshelves up and down the country. Although we can’t see this happening over night, especially as the Sony Reader is priced at a not very inviting £199.00.

The main drawback to these ‘readers’ is the lack of presence. A book remains a physical object, tangible and personal to it’s owner. A great cover design can draw our attention and add character to a book. We can become immersed in a book, picking it up everyday, creasing the cover and folding the corners when we can’t find a bookmark, oh and the battery never runs out on a book! The battery on the Sony Reader is rumored to last up to 7,000 page turns, although this appears to be a considerable amount you can guarantee that it will run out just when you don’t want it to.

Each eBook purchased is rights managed, in a similar way to tracks downloaded from the iTunes Store. The software is Windows based and not geared towards Mac OS (getting a thumbs down from us), but apparently with a bit of  jiggery pokery it can be hooked up to a Mac. You can also view PDF’s… in monotone (oh the joy, whoop whoop), but we all have iPods for that, don’t we?

It appears that Waterstones are the official re-seller of the Sony Reader. For more info, check out this link. www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/navigate.do?pPageID=1576

Masters Allen have recently been given the opportunity to produce album artwork for talented musician Jamie Kane.

We were very excited to work along side Jamie, after all album covers are a great area to stretch those creative legs! Think Factory records, Joy Division, New Order, Peter Saville etc.

The album entitled ‘On Bended Knees’ was recorded in the winter of 2007 and has proved to be very personal to Jamie. This is due to the fact that for the first time Jamie produced and played everything on the album with a little help from pedal steel players and gospel singers. This provided an excellent starting point for us to throw around some ideas.

Working from Jamie’s inspiration for the album, namely religion and it’s negative connotations we explored many different avenues. The final artwork was reached through a mixture of the original inspiration and the birth of Jamie’s second son.

Jamie has uploaded the tracks onto his myspace page; www.myspace.com/jamiekane
The page also contains further details of Jamie’s influences and other projects, so take a look.