brief / approach

...the brief was to provide a non-photographic, illustrative design

...the cover is a direct scan of a collage I made with my hand-drawn lettering & new logo added on photographically at the print production stage...

...I drew the outlined dancing figures and cut the shapes out with a scalpel; the 'sky' is crumpled up - and then smoothed out - blue craft paper; the 'sea' is done 'brass-rubbing' style (frottage) on tracing paper with a waxy/oily crayon over a roughened surface of roofing felt - pressing harder at the top and progressively lighter towards the bottom to get the fade effect - and the 'beach' is a piece of sandpaper - which I still think is a fun solution...

- Vertigo were very keen on having promo ads & poster feature the single's unusually written description ahead of the song title  - as a new dance E.P. (Extended Play single) - they especially liked the way I had 'scrunched' the line up by pushing the words together and omiting the extraneous letters - like the last 'D' of EXTENDED & first 'D' of  DANCE to make 'extendeDance' - similarly conjoining 'dance' & 'play' into 'dancEPlay' to highlight the fact it was an EP...

...the poster features backgrounds using 'frottage' and photographic effects done on my studio process camera and the lettering - like on the back of the single bag - is the Letraset trick I first  I developed  working on the early Theatre of Hate stuff - a technique that makes Letraset type look ‘scuzy’ & battered - first you rub down the letters as normal onto white artboard, then carefully colour it all over with a thick black felt pen, then firmly stick masking tape over the lettering and quickly peel it off (like a sticking plaster on hairy legs..!) that would remove most of the Letraset type but leave some little bits and a ragged edge - leaving roughened white type on a black background - then you’d do a photographic reversal print to make it into black type on a white background…

backstory

...Mark Knopfler asked me to give Dire Straits a new, noticeably different look - both for the covers and a logo and to avoid photography and particularly photos of the band - he liked the illustrative stuff I'd done at Stiff and for The Theatre of Hate and some recent freelance 'c-more-tone studios' covers & posters for Dave Edmunds and the Stray Cats...