Contemporary Art in Context: Sound Design

Graphic design is a multifaceted, rapidly developing, and competitive field that requires designers to understand trends in technology and culture while developing their craft. Joseph Bastardo, a contemporary designer, illustrator, and musician, balances technology, creativity, and a passion for electronic sounds through his innovative designs. Much of his work springs from music—he has designed posters, fliers, logos, t-shirts, and album covers for musicians, record labels, and collaborators from around the world, such as Japanese electronic musician Foodman (Takahide Higuchi).

Visual Representations
Bastardoʼs music production and graphic design work are closely aligned. He considers the process of collaging and layering essential to both art forms, whether it’s a color scheme, scale of the music, timbre of the notes, or visual texture. His visually striking album covers are meant to evoke and mirror the sounds heard in the recordings. In the Foodman cover (see below), hard-edged green forms mirror the visual signature of sound waves. In the Quimai cover (see below), the pointillist complementary colors in light values suggest the soft and understated sounds of the ambient music.

Bastardo’s intuitive layering of interacting images and shades of color can be seen as the visual representation of music in his design process. Perhaps his most complex collaboration is Electronic Perspectives (see Snapshots), a 400-page book on the history of synthesizers and electronic instruments written by Tom Rhea, a retired professor at the Berklee College of Music.

Art History: Graphic Design
Graphic design is typically defined as the combination of illustration and text to communicate a message. Its roots can be found in the earliest forms of visual language, such as Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. As written languages around the world evolved into letters and characters, the invention of printing—movable type in the East (1000s) and West (1400s)—soon followed. In the late 1700s to mid-1800s, new technology allowed mass production of books, broadsides (the ancestor of the poster), pamphlets, and advertisements. During the 1900s in the West, modern design evolved from movements like the Wiener Werkstätte in Austria, Bauhaus in Germany, and the International Typography Style in Switzerland. In the 1980s and 1990s, personal computers and software like Adobe Photoshop made graphic design widely available, forging a path for the age of the internet and social media.

About the Artist
Born in 1986 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Joe Bastardo has been creative all his life. In high school, his formative artistic experiences included playing in a band, discovering local art and music scenes, and learning Photoshop. He achieved a BA in Illustration from UMass Dartmouth in 2009 and has worked as a freelance designer since. Bastardo runs his own electronic music-focused record label, Moss Archive, and creates all of the album art, logos, and typography himself. As a musician, he has produced ten solo albums as Bastian Void and toured Japan with Ant’lrd (musician Colin Blanton) in 2017. The book Electronic Perspectives (see above) will be published in 2024.