For the past few weeks, Juxtapoz has been announcing a series of new Apple Music playlist artwork, one that sees a return to album artistry that has been all but forgotten in the era of streaming. As we noted, Apple's head of content design, Alex Grossman, in conjunction with Apple Music editorial team, have spent the last year working closely with some of the most prolific and talented graphic designers, artists and typographers in the world to create bespoke art that conveys the intention and meaning behind Apple playlists without ever reading the descriptions and make you feel before you ever hit play.
Today we have a special one to announce, as the legendary artist behind classic band logos such as AC/DC, Blue Oyster Cult and Boston, Gerard Huerta, has designed a special album artwork cover for Apple's "The Riff" playlist. As Apple's editors note, "Packed with today's biggest and best hard rock tunes, this playlist is like a fantasy festival of modern metal heroes, classic rock revivalists, enduring icons, and sweat-soaked freshmen." Who better to design that playlist than the man who has literally created a visual lookbook of hard rock? Listen to the playlist here.
Huerta notes of his artwork for this playlist: "The inspiration was really stepping back to a time when I created these old pieces. They come out of drawing, not typefaces or fonts. You look at what is unique to the letterforms presented and just begin moving the pencil around. First, I do a bunch of loose thumbnails, mark the ones I want to present, and come up with about four tight pencil drawings of each. These were presented to the client, then one of each is chosen and it is scanned into the computer and drawn and colored or rendered in vector. A few different treatments of the letter forms are done so the client has a choice of the final look."
