Roger Dean - Research

As well as Stanley Donwood, Roger Dean was another one in which i was advised to look at although it was actually me that randomly thought of Yes album covers in my tutorial and mentioned it and that was when Jamie sort of said 'ah yes roger dean'. So i had seen his work before in that sense but i don't really know the man behind it. 

He definitely creates the kind of work that is beyond my way of working. Ways such as he is a painter and he is incredible at being able to use his imagination to create fantasy like work, a genre in which i don't really show any interest. However it is the principle in the way he works that i am interested in and just like with Donwood i want to see how he talks about translating the music into the visual. 

Cover star : Roger Dean Interview - http://www.longlivevinyl.net/roger-dean-interview/

"I felt that if the band were making an effort to reinvent music, that there was an obligation to make the effort to have this product look like it came from the place where the music allegedly came from. You’re communicating beyond the word, an idea that’s come from somewhere else and what that somewhere else might be.”

Its nice that interview - https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/roger-dean

"I wanted to achieve a visual integrity, so the logo, the visual and the text looked like it came from the same place but somewhere else."

"I like that otherness, and I try to achieve it. When you look at a lot of modern album covers, the art school obsession with the Helvetica kind of undermines it. So instead of looking at an artefact that comes from another place entirely, you are looking at an artefact that has been caught and tamed and made corporate."

"The thing I am concerned about is the very simple dogma of modern design, and how it undermines quality in a surprising way. And it applies to graphic design, architecture, everything: that unbelievable necessity to strip everything down to its simplest form. I think it’s against nature. It’s a kind of religious zealotry."

“It was a very, very brief period in history when the album cover art and the music came together to make something that was the perfect gift. And it was, a perfect gift.”

Unfortunately this time i didn't find much useful in the video department with Roger Dean however the kind of things he's said in online interviews i've been very pleased and impressed with. Since he's been around in the profession a long time he has seen a development of the medium from vinyl where the album covers were most important and prevalent to the age of the digital download where the image might not be seen as important and definitely loses the tactile hand held element to the image. 

So for all those reasons he therefore has a large appreciation for the visual element that goes along side the music to truly speak and reflect what that said music represents.