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The New Album Cover from The National

by Douglas Wolk
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The striking cover design for The National’s highly anticipated album High Violet was created by Distant Station Ltd.—the Brooklyn-based design firm headed by Scott Devendorf, The National’s bassist. Like the band’s music, the image is arty, cryptic, dense with occluded meaning, and built on the contrast between monochromatic austerity and explosions of full-spectrum detail. The cover image is a photograph of “Untitled (Binding Force),” an assemblage by the installation artist Mark Fox, who’s also National singer Matt Berninger’s second cousin. (The color-penciled text suspended by wires like a cluster of artificial flowers in “Binding Force” is inspired by Catholic liturgy’s Doctrine of the Assumption of Mary.) Fox’s work, Berninger recently told the website The Quietus, “felt good for the record, because so many of the songs are these collages of thoughts and little ideas.”
 
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Image of the Day

Image of the Day February 9, 2012 
"Lines and lines" by Peter Crawley. A hand stitched ampersand; 6804 pierced holes, 3402 stitched lines, and black cotton thread. See more here.

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The Power Issue, in which we examine the true influence of design and the designer. On the cover: We asked Mirko Ilić to reinterpret one of the classic graphics created by Philippe Vermès during the 1968 French protests. To see the original, click here. To purchase print or digital copies of current or past issues of Print, click here.
 
 
 
 
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