Reid Miles

Reid Miles (* 1927 in Chicago , † 1993 ) was a US -American designer / graphic artist who from the early 1950s in New York worked. He achieved great fame with his work for the jazz label Blue Note Records , for which he designed around five hundred record covers in 15 years and thus left an indelible mark on the design of the 20th century .

Unlike today's CD cases, the surface of a long-playing record cover provided a designer like Miles with a sufficiently large canvas that he could use excellently. He combined photography , coloring and typography like nobody had seen before and with this abstract, innovation-seeking symbolism, elegantly embodied the "coolness" of the music contained in the covers.

Miles worked closely with the co-owner of Blue Note and photographer Francis Wolff , who provided him with pictures of the jazz musicians , often taken on the street . Miles cut these very tightly and used them either very large or very small, placed them at unusual angles on the surface and combined them with large, thick blocks of color. The artist, who had a good eye for fonts , usually added large, sans serif block letters, which he probably cast in metal at the time and enlarged or reduced the size photographically.

Amazingly, Miles didn't particularly enjoy jazz music - he preferred classical music . Miles never listened to the recordings, but instead drew his inspiration from conversations with Alfred Lion , founder of Blue Note Records.

publication

• Typomundus 20. A project of the International Institute of Typographic Arts (ICTA) , Reinhold Publishing Corporation New York, Studio Vista Ltd. London, Otto Maier Verlag Ravensburg, 1966, no p.

Web links

• “Design Icon: Blue Note” thoughts on Miles on Creative Blog