You'll be tested

Today, for the first time in ages, I had a lazy afternoon all to myself with nothing at all I really had to do. Absolute bliss. I've been busy with work and play and a couple of other little projects, so some down time was just what the doctor ordered.

On the website of my favourite newspaper, The Guardian, I came across this article called "Let's play...make your own album cover!" It's basically all about "seeing what beautiful collisions of image and text fate can throw together, and then imagining what kind of music the resulting band might play." I'm a huge fan of accidental beauty and the miracle of coincidences and because I was just in the right mood to do something fun that served no purpose at all, I gave it a try.

These are the five steps:

Get a band name:
Simply use the title of a randomly-generated Wikipedia article.

Get an album title:
Use the last four or five words from the last quote on a page of random quotations.

Get some album art:
Use the image thrown up using this Flickr tool, which generates random images without copyright restrictions.

Make it look nice:
Using Photoshop, Paint, or whatever graphics software you have, fiddle your band logo and album title into some kind of visually-pleasing assemblage.


I swear to god I only spent about five minutes on each album cover and came up with five albums good enough to top the charts, I think. It's amazing how beautiful randomness can be. There is something so pure about coincidence, which you can almost not create by trying. The idea is that you also write a little blurb about what music the band might play but that was a bit too much time for me to spend on this little project, as much fun as it is. Here are my results: