In doing the design for Brian Eno's interview in Tape Op #85 I had wanted to try and illustration instead of a photo for the piece. There is a Picasso drawing of Igor Stravinsky that I liked and I felt a similar feel would work well for the Eno piece.
It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. My friend Miles Hermann did about 8 or 9 different portraits but felt like he hadn't quite hit it right. "Everytime I felt I was getting close, I'd go a little further and it felt like I lost it." I suggested Miles try a few more, but stop as soon as he began to feel he was in the ballpark, kind of the art equivalent of resisting the urge to add another overdub. Nonetheless, I really liked one of the portraits Miles did even if it was not quite what I had in mind. This is the one we ended up using in the article:
But, Miles did another portrait the I really liked that was closer to the Picasso drawing. We did layouts of the opening page with both portraits and showed them to some people. I was leaning towards the newer, simpler portrait but Larry (and most of his friends) liked the first one. The day we went to press, Larry emailed me and said, "My graphic design friend likes the simpler one too. Use whichever one you want." Well, we'd already made a decision I figured so we went with the first portrait for the USA edition of Tape Op, but here's the other one so you can see it. We'll run this version in the UK printing.
Here's another portrait we used at the end of the article:
Here are some photos we didn't use in the article:
