Over the winter of '97, while shooting a documentary at the House of Guitars in Rochester, NY, I became acquainted with Andy Babiuk, the guitarist for The Chesterfield Kings. The Kings are a throwback to 60's rock & roll - they can sound like the Stones without even trying, and their albums range from surf pop to late 60's garage rock. They've been around for 20 years now, and have built such a reputation for themselves that it's not unusual to see Ron Wood from the Stones or Mark Lindsay from Paul Revere and the Raiders guesting on a track. When not on tour, most of them work at the HoG while recording new material.

Since they had been around for 20 years, they felt it was time to put out some sort of a retrospective video. Andy asked me to design some sort of opening title graphics for it, and provided me a copy of their logo to work from. The only thing is, this was a third generation shrunken-down photocopy of their logo, and the logo itself was nearly 20 years old (and looked like it had originally been drawn in a high school notebook). They'd evolved over the years from a garage punk band into nearly a psychedelic rock group, and it seemed to me that the logo could use a little polish.

I kept the basic idea the same, but gave it a fluidity that it never had before. I scanned a pencil sketch of the new '1968' logo and neatened it up in Neopaint. I needed something to put it against, however - something as acid-retro as the logo itself. A while previously, I'd been experimenting with Fractal Design's Painter, and had come up with a green image (that looked like grass) with wierd blobs throughout. I reopened that picture in Painter, fudged with the colors, smeared everything around and then reapplied the blob filter. The result was great, and I brought that into Photoshop and put it behind the logo, retooling the background's colors and their saturation until I was happy with it. Then I experimented for a while on how to color the letters so they looked sort of tie-dyed. I can't remember what I finally ended up doing, but it came out looking really good.