The ISMIR 2024 conference needed a logo that would reflect the rich musical heritage of the San Francisco Bay Area as well as the creativity and rock’n’roll energy of the MIR community. Who better to bring these elements together than renowned illustrator Justin Hampton?
We spoke with Mr. Hampton about his work, the ISMIR 2024 logo, perspectives on AI in creative practice, and his new book. We are honored that the visual face of ISMIR 2024 is designed by such a titan of the field. Check out the recording of our discussion or read some highlights below!
Justin Hampton has been creating powerful and resonant artwork since 1990. His work can be seen in galleries, clubs, and homes around the globe. Born in Santa Cruz, California and raised in southern Oregon, Hampton has designed posters for the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, Metallica, NIN, Radiohead, Ween, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Primus, Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan, and Motörhead. His clients have included Rolling Stone, Guitar World, Lollapalooza, Spin, Interscope Records, Village Voice, and Seattle’s Showbox & The Paramount Theatres as a short list. Justin lives in Portland, Oregon with his son Miles, daughter Lilac, and his dog Ruby. His book, “Visual Feast: The Tantalizing Artwork of Justin Hampton”, is available for preorder and will be released in June 2024.
Blair Kaneshiro and Oriol Nieto, along with Gautham Mysore, are the General Chairs of the ISMIR 2024 Conference. ISMIR 2024 will take place as a hybrid conference from November 10–14 in San Francisco, CA, USA and online.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
BK: To get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself
JH: I'm in Portland, Oregon, and I was basically a West Coast kid. I was born in Santa Cruz, California. My mom moved us up to Southern Oregon when I was a little tyke, and after I graduated high school I moved up to Seattle, and I was there for 20 years before moving to Portland.
BK: Can you tell us about the creative influences on your art?
JH: Absolutely. It's an amalgam of a lot of different things, a lot of which came out of the 60s in San Francisco with the original psychedelic art. So there was a lot of pop culture stuff: Comic book art, album, skateboard art. Those were all a big goulash of influences that went into what became me.
ON: Your brand as an illustrator is so linked to music. I'm wondering how this came to be, and if you're a fan of the music that you design for – and whether that's important or not.
JH: It is, actually. A majority of my choices of working with bands have been for bands that I actually really like. I will disclaim that not every single one has been, but the majority of the ones that I've done stuff with have been very selectively curated to be stuff that I like, because it's easier for me to get into working for them if I like the work, the band themselves. And then the really fun thing about that is when I have interactions with the collectors of my work, they feel like I understand them because they have the same tastes. So that makes for a cool bond with the people that collect my work.
ON: Can you tell us a little bit more about the non-music work that you do?
JH: From the very beginning, when I started I was an illustrator. So I've done stuff for magazines over the years; I've done private commissions; I've done logos for various companies, including yours. But mostly rock-oriented has been my thing. I've done some other stuff – I've done some fantasy art – but it's mostly been around music.
BK: We approached you recently about designing a logo for the ISMIR 2024 conference. I was wondering if you could walk us through the logo.
JH: Well, this being in San Francisco, there's no getting away from the San Francisco 60s vibe when it comes to that city and typography, especially. This one's very heavily influenced by the 60s masters – like Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso – who were just absolute geniuses when it came to typography. And the idea behind it was to have the word “ISMIR” basically be a graphic representation of the Golden Gate Bridge. The disc in the middle, which is a record, symbolizes the sun – the California sun for the Golden State. And the typography of the dates I wanted to appear like they were spinning around the record, and that there would be music notes coming off of the logo that were almost like seagulls going over the bridge. So it's got a lot going on as far as what I was trying to convey for the California San Francisco vibe, and a nod to the 60s greats that established that visual look. So it was really fun. I had a good time coming up with the idea and coming up with how I would implement that idea to represent that.
BK: One thing that was surprising was to see the color scheme come in at the end because we had been looking at it in black and white through the previous iterations of the design. Did you always know that it would have this sunset-into-ocean color scheme?
JH: Yeah, in my head. It wasn't exactly dialed in my brain yet, but I had a very distinct feeling of what I wanted to do. A lot of the 60s posters were done with complementary colors, which are the most eye-catching color scheme that you can come up with. So the orange, obviously for Golden Gate Bridge, blue for water, which is under the bridge with San Francisco. But they're so vibrating to your eye, which is the entire point of the 60s posters. It was fun to watch it unfold, because I had a loose idea in my brain how it would work. But you don't fully know until it starts unfolding.
ON: It works so well with the conference, because we have a special theme on bridging the world of AI and creative practices in the music domain. I'm wondering what type of technologies you usually use. Do you use any of this AI that is now around us? And I'm wondering how this workflow has evolved over the years.
JH: Everything that I've done since the very beginning has been very analog, very hand drawn hand inks. And so in my posters everything was done that way, shot to film. And then originally I would do overlays of film where you would cut the colors out in Rubylith and pull off the film that you didn't want, and keep the layer of film that you did; and that became the color. Around 2000 I segued into moving on from that and getting more technologically with the times. And so I started doing stuff in Photoshop. And that's what I do the majority of my work in. I know a lot of artists, illustrators use Illustrator because it's vector-based; but I use mostly pixel-based Photoshop, because when I finish all my color separations in Photoshop, they're generally just transferred to a PDF – that's output to film that's pixel-based anyway. So that's how this was done, too. But in this case, the difference of how I used to do it to how I do it now is, I did the sketch by hand – I did it in pencil – and then once I was really happy with the design I took it into Photoshop, and then did all my layers and all my nuancing and color choices and polishing in Photoshop. So no, I haven't used AI at all. In fact, I'm not a big fan of AI. Like anything, it's a tool if it's something that can enhance your work and give you new ideas. I think that's great. For art, it's really tough to get behind for me, because with the latest AI tool that's been using art, they have basically sampled 16 thousand different illustrators, including myself. And then they're making it available so people can do art with all of those influences. And I think we've got a way to go to where if that's in there, there should be compensation for that. If I'm being plugged in as a name, or any other artists as a name, there should be some form of compensation to the artists. That's my biggest sticking point. And then there are so many people that are saying they're artists now by putting in some prompts. And that's not what it is, if you're not putting your own skills behind it. I get the usage of it as a tool for artists to use, or even conceptual ideas. It's all so brand new that it's hard to say where it's going to go. But as an old-school artist, it's a tough one for me.
ON: I'm curious to know if there's anything that you can do when you realize, hey! My work has been used for training all of these models without my consent. I know that the New York Times has put this lawsuit against OpenAI. But I'm wondering if individual artists are doing anything regarding this.
JH: Well, I know that there's a class action lawsuit. I don't know if it's just that one, or if there's more. But it seems like there should be compensation. I feel that way about streaming music, too. I think the artists should be compensated much better than they are. It boggles my mind that no one has come forward with a class action lawsuit of all the musicians that are getting pennies on the dollar for streaming, and the streaming companies are making so much money. I think the artists – you have to stand up for yourself. You have to make a stand, or you're just gonna be bowled over by it. And it's all so brand new – even the streaming thing is brand new in the course of music history. So it's gonna take a while. Hopefully things even out to where there's some compensation and fairness practices that go with it. But like anything it's gonna take throwing money at it, getting people behind it trying to change things. But it's all in its early stages.
BK: We know that you have a book coming out and we'd love to hear about it.
JH: Very true. My book is called Visual Feast, and it's coming out this summer. I did a Kickstarter for it two years ago. It's been a bit of a process to get it all final and finished, but it's now finally happening and I'm very excited. Speaking of San Francisco, the cover image with the Alice in Wonderland Theme was originally for a band called Ween for a show that they had in San Francisco. And I went with the Alice in Wonderland theme because that was such a predominant visual at that time, especially with Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”. So that was a fun little nod back then in 2009, and then when I decided to do my retrospective book, I removed the band's name and replaced it with my daughter's face as Alice. So she posed for that, and that's exactly how she looks, minus the menacing lighting and all. So she's very excited to be on the cover, and it's a 30-year retrospective of my work in rock’n’roll and creating images for bands, and it's got everything I've ever done in the book. It's a 444-page book that also goes into some of the behind-the-scenes stories about working with bands: Photos, sketches, progressions to the final concept, that kind of thing. So it's a very intensive, almost autobiographical book as well as a retrospective art book. I’m super excited.
ON: When is it coming out?
JH: This June. I can't wait to have book signings and start getting it in people's hands.
BK: And I understand your daughter is also an artist, is that right?
JH: Yeah, she's really quite talented. She's had a couple of pieces in some local shows here in town, a pretty well-known gallery in town, Brassworks Gallery, and the curator and owner of the gallery saw her work and was like, would you like to have your daughter highlighted in a local show? And she was very excited, so of course she said yes. That was this last December. She's really, really good, and she's only getting better, and it's very exciting to see. She's only 14, but she's slaying it. It's awesome to watch.
ON: What else is on the horizon for you in 2024 or beyond?
JH: I'm hoping to have some select dates along the West Coast, New York, possibly Chicago, or pretty much anywhere I can find a place that's willing to have me and pick up some books and have an event around it. I'm hoping to have some in Europe as well, but we'll see – it's a big book.
BK: That's so cool, too, because I think so many people encounter your work through the musicians for whom you design. But this will be fully centered on you.
JH: That's true – I hadn't really thought about it that way. But there was actually a show that I was a part of in 2002 in Seattle that was with two of my peers, and we had a design group called Post Neo Explosionism. And we did posters for various bands’ tours – including Queens of the Stone Age, Audioslave, and Built to Spill – and we had a show at that time of all of our posters, and we got various bands to come play for us, which was really, really cool. Because it was that same idea that it's always all about the bands; but that moment in particular was really funny, because it was about the artists. So hopefully, with this book coming out, we'll put together some performances by different folks who have done stuff; that would be really fun. We'll see – everyone's got busy schedules, so it's not always a given that that can happen.
BK: And I bet you're gonna hear a lot of interesting stories from the people who come to your book signings.
JH: That's what I love. When people come and they say, you know I met my wife at this show, and we got this poster from 15 years ago, and it hangs above our fireplace. I love stories like that. It's amazing. It's weird. Because as an artist, you're just in your studio churning out work. You're not seeing the impact that it's having on a regular basis, or even that often. But when you do, it's always like, oh, yeah, my stuff is in the world. Weird. Yeah, cool, it's affected people. It's always fun to hear that stuff.