Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 11:11:15 -0500 From: Roy Burns Subject: Wired Oliver >From www.wired.com ================== One of the few jobs Vaughan Oliver could find after design school was at a London company that fashioned labels for foods: Seagram's liquors, Quaker Oats, and Heinz canned beans. Now one of Britain's premier designers, Oliver is grateful for the hours he spent arranging letters around photo-graphs of porridge. "It made me look at type for the first time," says the unassuming native of northeast England. "I started to see its potential." Oliver's signature has since been type - Arabic numerals, Chinese characters, and calligraphy - which he layers with photographic images. Most of his work graces the covers of LPs and CDs: he crafts them only after immersing himself in the music and conjuring up an image. Oliver became a music-label designer after he "banged into a chap called Ivo in a record store." Ivo Watts-Russell was starting an indie label, 4AD, and Oliver joined him to produce covers with more artistry than the usual group picture of the band. Since 1988, he and three assistants at his studio, v23, have put together album covers and posters for The Breeders, Modern English, and The Pixies. But Oliver is tiring of his work with CDs and what he calls their "crappy little plastic cases. I can't be intricate and detailed like I could with records," he says. In the past few years, he has taken on a variety of projects: he recently collaborated with Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake on a book depicting Ohtake's dreams and is devising covers for huH, a Santa Monica, California-based music magazine. Oliver's LP and CD designs are part of a permanent exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The covers have also been shown in Tokyo, Osaka, LA, and Nantes, France. But Oliver is ambivalent about the exhibitions. "They divorce the image from the music. Ideally, you're listening to the music and looking at the image. You're experiencing them together." - Mandy Erickson