Reid Miles was an amazing modernist designer who designed over 500 LP covers for Blue Note Records through the 1950′s and 60′s.
When you look at the work of Miles, you can’t help but feel as if you’re looking at Jazz realized.
His covers sound like [they know] what lay in store for the listener. Even to those who have no idea about—or hardly heard—jazz, the covers just look the way jazz covers should.
Perhaps its the typography? Or the photography? Or maybe it’s the colour? I think of jazz as an explosion of soulful sounds, which are peppered with extreme emotion. The covers that Miles designed have much in common with this idea.
Stunning black and white photography is the life blood for most of the covers, and a splash of colour hits as an explosion of excitement or lust or cool as the typography is always in the right spot.
They scream modernism in a way that few can compete against, often treating the typography as visual elements that can be broken apart, stacked upon one another in a playful way, blown up or shrunk down and brought together with the photography in a way that seems gravitational. The layouts are often evasively perfect as they look as if to lay any of them out even slightly differently would be to lay them out wrong.
This is the genius of Miles. While he would design over 500 album covers for the Jazz cornerstone, and receive (sometimes multiple) copies of each, he wasn’t a fan. He would instead unload them off to friends or trade them in for classical instead.
He was smart enough to know when to allow the fantastic photography of collaborator, and Blue Note Record co-founder, Francis Wolff to shine through. He didn’t try to be too smart Wolff’s images, letting them to do the talking, whether the discussions it would hold were with the audience or the rest of the design.
And then those splashes of colour! Oh! How lovely! Emotional colour at its best. A dab here, a tint there. The way in which he used colour is a great example of good design. Much like the photography and the typography, he knew when to turn the volume down to 3 and then when to push it up to eleven. The duotone photos work powerfully and benefit from strong contrasts in the photo as well as down-played type that, when the colour was rich, is often quite poor in size.
His keen eye would ensure that the typography, colour and imagery are all considered and benefit because of it. When the title is loud, the photography is turned down. When the typography wants to take center-stage, the photography would allow it, often with the colour playing the role as the three-piece backing band.
But the thing that gets me the most excited is his typography. After looking at enough of his covers you can begin to know which Blue Note covers are his and which were done by other designers. The typography is always so neatly stacked, with letters vertically aligning playfully, yet delicately, and always have a visual flow that gently guides the eye.
And there are also the little quirks to be found — sometimes the type is balanced on the tip of a finger, separated by a cigarette in hand or hanging from a saxophone. It’s these little visual quips that add a level of charm that do nothing but benefit. It shows the design is relaxed enough that it doesn’t need to scream to be smart.
The International Typographic Style was finding its stride in the United States having recently been brought from Europe through various trade publications just as Reid Miles was starting his employment at Blue Note. It was a wonderful marriage of moments.
The newness of this style of design makes his covers even more enticing. The audience wasn’t just happy to associate a clean design to their music that they so loved. This kind of design was new to them, not something appropriated in an effort to find an air of dignity or class. But they ate it up and made it theirs, all while Reid Miles gave jazz a new visual language that still sounds like the cat’s meow.
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