Three of the owners of YRK Creative and publishers of YRK Magazine are from the band LIVE. If you don't know Live, they are "The multi-platinum band from Pennsylvania--Ed Kowalczyk (vocals, guitar), Chad Taylor (guitar, backing vocals), Patrick Dahlheimer (bass) and Chad Gracey (drums, percussion)--have sold over 22 million albums worldwide and earned two number one albums (Throwing Copper, Secret Samadhi). Their catalog is filled with such gems as “Lightning Crashes,” “I Alone,” “All Over You,” and “Lakini’s Juice,” which live on today as classics on rock radio."
While working for YRK Creative, I had the opportunity to work a few projects for the band, which I always was happy to do, mainly because I grew up in the nineties and loved this band. One of the coolest things I got to do for them was the Autograph print for their Mental Jewelry anniversary tour.
The purple and greens of the print are meant to evoke the cover art of the album, and the shape of the photo alignment is also reminiscent of the album cover. The band provided the new headshots for the piece, although I made the decision to make them black and white, again as a nod to the album itself. The back is very open to leave plenty of room for autographs from the band, while also adding social media and website links.
Speaking of websites, I got to help them make a "temporary" site for their return of the original line-up. With a tight deadline and not much of a budget for the site, I found a very simple base template to use for the site, but by the time we went to launch the site it was very much a "ship of Theseus" situation from how much code and sections got changed. Over the years we have changed out some photos, sections, and emails, but for the most part it's still the same site we launched years ago.
Over my years of working at YRK Creative, we were also asked to pitch several concepts that just never quite got to the production stage for any number of reasons. These projects include several concepts for new tour shirt designs, custom guitar picks, illustrations for shirt designs for their return, live "live" album cover illustrations (not pictured), and even more that didn't get to the concept page. Even though they didn't get produced, I was still proud to pitch them all.
The members of the band also have their own custom studio in their headquarters in York, and over the years I helped on dozens of different projects for the Think Loud Studios. These projects ranged from Postcards, Websites, Magazine ads, Business Cards, and more.
