Music catalogues, album artwork and artist career materials for one of the UK's most respected independent labels — home to Elvis Costello, Marc Bolan, Jeff Buckley and more.
Demon Music Group is one of the UK's leading independent music labels and distributors. My role encompassed their mail order division — known as Blackmail — producing the full range of printed materials that drove their direct-to-consumer catalogue business.
I designed music catalogues and point-of-sale materials for the Blackmail division, creating the visual language that customers experienced when browsing and buying from Demon's back catalogue. The work required a deep understanding of music, typography and the kind of layouts that make a record collection feel curated rather than just listed.
I also contributed to album cover design, including Nick Lowe's Dig My Mood and The Men They Couldn't Hang's Majestic Grill. Alongside the full album packaging, I designed A5 career leaflets for a number of artists in the Demon catalogue — concise, well-designed pieces that accompanied releases and gave context to an artist's body of work. These covered Elvis Costello, Marc Bolan, Brinsley Schwarz and others.
The challenge was always to honour the music — to design materials that felt worthy of the artists without getting in the way of the work itself.
A sustained body of work produced across multiple years, delivering print materials that brought the quality of Demon's catalogue to life on the page. The career leaflets in particular became a blueprint for how to introduce a new audience to an established artist economically and elegantly.
