Title: High Fangs band collateral
Agency: Grosz Co.Lab (VIC)
Client: High Fangs
Stocks: JAC Fluorescent / Kaskad / Sovereign Offset
Printed by: Grosz Co.Lab (VIC)
The marketing team has voted. If any of us leave Doggett’s, we’re joining a rock n roll band. In the meantime, we’ll take the use of our stock, uncoated JAC Fluorescent, as the closest link we have to a future in the music industry. Grosz Co.Lab, a Melbourne based design studio, have crafted a graphic language for High Fangs, a Melbourne three piece. A truly original visual aesthetic that encapsulates the band’s DIY rough and ready sound and live performance reputation has been created.
Just to put the band into context, they’re described as: ‘A fusion of 60s Garage, 70s Power Pop, Stiff Records New Wave, 00s Swedish Punk energy minus an Ikea™ Allen Key’ on their site. Somehow, this explains why JAC Fluoro is such a good choice! The visual language includes a typeface (High Fang irregular), gig posters, packaging and 3D props, logo, icons, illustrations, symbols and graphic patterns. The torn paper approach seen throughout the work provided a communication style totally reflective of the band’s music and work.
As Ben Grosz (designer by day, band member by night) mentioned to us: “We purposefully decided to do the printing ourselves in the Grosz Co.Lab studio. It’s been so enjoyable to get our hands dirty and create every piece of collateral from print to props by hand.” JAC meant Grosz Co.Lab could achieve maximum visual and economic impact, also deciding to use the stickers for guerrilla marketing, merchandise packaging or to giveaway at gigs.
Ben mentioned they had to do lots of tests before choosing to stencil white acrylic paint (using strips created by tearing, scanning, vectorising and printing a stencil to cut-out) directly onto the JAC adhesive. When the sheets were dry enough they manually fed them hrough a very cheap A4 black and white laser printer for overprinting. The fluoro colour ways of green, orange, red and yellow were rolled-out across 300 hand made, tear open record sleeves for the band’s 7″ double A side single ‘heart tearing’ themed release.
Not up for stopping there, Grosz Co.Lab recycled previously purchased and unused poster sized stock, tearing and transforming the Sovereign Offset 120gsm and Kaskad Raven Black 160gsm into electric guitars for the band’s video clip. The paper was stuck on cardboard and foam core frames.
It seems some lateral thinking, a cost effective, individual approach and a glue stick = maximum impact. Our JAC Fluoro never looked so cool. Long live rock n roll!