Ian Anderson and The Designers Republic origins are without a doubt in the music scene, with their earliest works creating club posters, event fliers and album covers for the bands they knew and frequently worked with. In the 90s, they became a key collaborator with the Sheffield imprint Warp Records designing various covers and even the label’s logo. Legendary electronic music producer Aphex Twin, perhaps the most famous artist from Warp Records, has done numerous covers with TDR.

The cover to “Come to Daddy Remixed” by Aphex Twin is a more stripped down typographic focused cover TDR did, officially released October 6^th, 1997. The cover features only white text on an orange background, with no other stylistic elements on any other parts of the cover except the barcode. The cover was inspired by the telecommunications company Orange, which featured a track from the album in one of their advertisements.

TDR worked on the original album cover for “Come to Daddy” which featured edited photographs of children with Richard James (Aphex Twin) face on them. For the remixed version of the album, they chose to subvert the photographic motif and present only text. This was partly due to copyright reasons, Anderson stating the image they had originally chosen, taken from the Orange ad, was unable to be used due to copyright. Anderson stating in an interview with the New York Times Style Magazine, because of the copyright issues, “we reduced the ad to a short descriptive text in reversed white out of orange.”

Bibliography

Beta, Andy. “Behind the Groundbreaking Design of Aphex Twin’s Record Covers.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 22 Sept. 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/t-magazine/aphex-twin-syro-record-designers-republic-ian-anderson.html.

Image from: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/t-magazine/aphex-twin-syro-record-designers-republic-ian-anderson.html.