Your Logo Needs a Colorful Gradient
And now a public service announcement from the Council for Retro Art in Metal.
We’ve passed peak brutality. The experts warned us for years, but we foolishly struck forward with our incessant blast beats, ear-piercing feedback, and relentless gutturals. Where once there was a brave new world of endless savagery, we’re now left with a desolate soundscape in which nothing will ever be heavy enough for an emerging world of thirsty metal consumers. Left with diminishing returns, what is a young band to do? Will you copy Revenge again? We’ve already got hundreds of bands attempting to drill that well that which has long since run dry. If we hope to make it through this decade we’ll need to come together, tighten our belts, and revisit the renewable energies that carried us through the first generations of heavy music. We need to bring back discernible chord progressions. We need to rely on windmill pit energy. We need clean, renewable, colorful metallic gradient logos.
That’s the stuff
Ever since a socially awkward pimpled teenager stabbed another socially awkward pimpled teenager in Norway back in the early 90s, we’ve totally saturated the market with an endless stream of needlessly raw, tuneless metal with stark, pointy artwork. It’s now such a novelty for a band to have a legible, fun logo that death metal bills featuring Party Cannon regularly show up on sub-par metal meme pages. How much longer can the metal environment or Metal Archives continue to sustain the endless deluge of scratchy black and white scribbles?
For all I care, these are sandwich orders
Sometime in the mid 90s, the design world got together and decided that full-color gradients were passé, too silly for the Xtreme modern times. To embrace the era of wallet chains, large pants, and DJs in rock bands, designers needed to follow the inexplicable popularity of Rob Liefeld and just fuckin’ ruin everything by making it edgy.
While the rest of the world has moved on from the embarrassing past, the world of metal is slow to catch up. Aside from a handful of retro acts, metal bands are fiercely loyal to scratchy logos with a monochromatic color palate. Friends, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can break out of your self-imposed aesthetic prison. Buck the decades of NO FUN CLUB tradition and embrace a forgotten classic: the colorful, metallic gradient.
Color, for those of you that haven’t seen it in a while, presents a richer visual experience for viewers. The metallic features are helpful for indicating that you are extremely metal and also probably pretty tuff. It’s difficult to imagine a more iconic or bad-ass metal logo than the one used by Wodos.
We live in a world filled with color. Step outside of the hackneyed design choices of extreme metal and explore the incredible possibilities once touted by the grandpa metal gods. On behalf of the Council for Retro Art in Metal and the Toilet ov Hell, thank you for your time.
