Using grass

I was chuffed to receive my copy of Everything That Happens Will Happen Today in the mail last night, after ordering the web-based 'media bundle' back in August. It's nice when you order something, forget about and then are reminded again.

I like the album, and had some large expectations about it as My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Byrne and Eno's last collaboration) is a very important work to me. It's a new thing, and completely stands on it's own in a new way. I endorse it's purchase.

I opened the CD's digipak and was greeted by an internal design using grass as the design element and texture.


For my commercial work I did a CD-ROM for the Australian Football League which also used grass on the disc and packaging design. In fact, I was surprised I got away with it, as on opening the package the viewer was confronted with this huge expanse of green with little breaking up the page. Here's the disc design:


Sagmeister are responsible for the (amazing) design work, and achieved a far better and conceptually different grass than I did. The whole package is a tasteful bit of work.

Bear in mind, I'm not posting this to suggest that I was there first or anything like that - grass is a fairly common design element. It's interesting to see how an idea can be presented differently by only using a texture. With my grass I was going for a worn, used and ran-upon grass, where Sagmeister's is far more hyper-real, quasi-fake and suburban.