In 2004 a young Glaswegian stepped off the plane onto the tarmac of Auckland Airport with the hopes of making a name for himself in the graphic design arena of the NZ music industry. Now, 20 years and hundreds of local album covers later, Barny Bewick of Indium Design, reflects on his time as Aotearoa’s ‘go-to guy’ for album cover art.
After completing a Fine Arts degree in Bristol, England, in 1992, Barny unsurprisingly discovered that art careers were hard to come by. A short stint in the 9-5 environment solidified that art – not admin – should be his focus, and so he took off with a one-way ticket to Australia, painting murals on tour to earn his keep. Returning to the UK two years later and catching up with an old acquaintance proved the catalyst to his dream job and future career.
A friend, then MD of London-based independent label Mushroom Records, offered him a position… in the stockroom. Barny spent the next two years packing and shipping orders throughout Europe, including the Flying Nun back catalogue (which by coincidence 10 years later, he would design the 25th year anniversary box-set for), and attending design night courses, before an opening became available in the Australian-owned label’s art room, and he was offered the role. In the days when many record companies employed their own in-house design department, he honed his skills with a vast array of famous names across multiple genres; artists including Muse, Funeral For A Friend and Paul Oakenfold.
The merging of smaller labels into the heavyweight stalwarts of the UK music scene prompted Barny to form Indium Design, a standalone company tailored to the needs of this unique industry. His relocation to Auckland happened shortly thereafter, and the task of establishing himself in this new, rather smaller territory began.
Connections from the UK already existed in Auckland, Ashley Page (a former employee of Mushroom UK) helped him get his foot in the door, providing designs for FMR. Months of cold-calling and portfolio showings finally began to pay off, as local bands and labels embraced the new designer in town. Highly successful acts Pluto, Anika Moa, Elemeno P, The Feelers and The D4, to name just some, turned to Indium for the creation of their artwork.
In 2006 Barny won the Best Album Cover Tui award for Joel Little‘s pop-punk outfit Goodnight Nurse’s album ‘Keep Me On Your Side’, which featured a hologram of a stylised deer head. Finalist nominations for this accolade would come again in 2015, 2018 and 2022, for his work with Cairo Knife Fight and Alien Weaponry. The then-thriving compilation album market also saw him devising covers for the chart topping series ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ from 2006 to its demise in 2018, by which time the rise of Spotify had rendered the need for pre-ordained, commercially sold, playlist-based CDs defunct.
And therein lies the rub. With the ever-changing landscape where the physical product has been replaced by digital data, despite the current resurgence of the previously extinct LP, the camera on your phone superseding the technology of the handheld camera and, most recently, AI promising the ability for anyone to create an image of literally anything they can imagine at the touch of a button, how does the humble art-based designer survive? In short – with some difficulty.
“A lot has changed over the two decades I’ve been doing this,” the affable music-focused designer understates, his Scottish accent still very evident. “But the end goal of producing a memorable, marketable cover remains just the same. That background of working at Mushroom, where everything was on a tight budget, has proved invaluable. I can create elaborate artwork for a band without blowing their usual modest budget on superfluous requirements.”
By way of example, he turns to the artwork for ‘Ala Mai’, the debut album by Shepherds Reign. The cover and subsequent imagery depict his own concept of a blindfolded, heavily tattooed Polynesian warrior rising from a pool of blackness, roaring to the sky as a mysterious elixir drips from him.
“Twenty years ago this would have involved hiring a photographic studio, stylist, photographer, model, catering and everything else involved. In 2023, it was just myself, and photographer Michael Loh, hanging a tarpaulin in my carport! I poured a mixture of corn syrup and black food dye over the band’s ‘matai’ [chief] as Michael shot the image. The band doing a run to the local bakery for a few pies halfway through the day was the only extravagance!
“These days, a lot of bands are making more money from their merchandise than they are from record sales. It’s a hard market, with the public no longer buying the physical product in sufficient quantities, which leaves many local acts with only touring and merchandise sales to create revenue.
“The hangover from Covid means it’s harder for any act to fill a room and get people in front of their performance and products, which all trickles down to bands having to cut corners on where they can. With this in mind, I reckon it’s all the more vital for bands to have quality artwork for releases, and especially merchandise. On the last Devilskin tour, 50% of their entire tour earnings were made up from the sale of merchandise items I designed.”
He describes it as humbling to know that at a recent Metal Days festival in Slovenia, the Indium-designed Alien Weaponry ‘Kai Tangata’ T-shirt was the second highest selling merch item sold, only bested by that of show headliners Judas Priest.
The resurgence of vinyl as a premium recording medium, after a 20 year absence has, he acknowledges, been a real boost in these difficult times.
“The amount of artwork required by a band for an album campaign has diminished over the years, from three to four physical CD singles and an elaborate album design to a solitary digital cover! With vinyl back on the table, there is more real estate for artwork to tell the story of the music – and it can also be viewed at a size where detail is not lost. “I haven’t ever let the smaller format dictate the amount of detail in my art though, as the end result is often transferred to merchandise, stage backdrops and street posters. Another plus of having been in this profession for this long is that many of the CD designs I created in the early days are now enjoying their 20th year anniversary and so are being released, for the first time, on vinyl!”
And what of AI, surely this will dispense with the need for the designer, or make everyone with access to the software a budding Storm Thorgerson?
“I don’t believe so, no. It is certainly a useful tool, and can solve the problem of sourcing a hard-to-come-by image, like recently when I designed an EP cover for the band Investigator. They described a surreal scene of WW2 spitfires attacking a Spanish galleon on the high seas as one component of their cover idea. My usual source of stock imagery produced no results for said ship, however I utilised AI to create one for me and incorporated that into my digital canvas.
“I think a lot of purely AI generated artwork has a very polished look to it, a sort of autotune for the eyes! I’d rather use it as a provider, if required, to work alongside conventional methods. As an example the album cover I made for Imperial Slave‘s debut album, featuring a crowd of 50 skeletal figures, may have been much easier to create had I enlisted AI rather than having individual photos taken of each pose, but it may not have resulted in such a convincing final image.
“Although new technology is at their fingertips most of my clients still prefer a professional to conceptualise and produce the visual embodiment of their music. Devilskin, Cairo Knife Fight, Alien Weaponry, Just One Fix and many others have all entrusted me for over many years to provide them with imagery for their releases and merchandise. Their loyalty is greatly appreciated.
“Fair to say, it is a bit bleak out there at present. Many great Kiwi bands have had to call it a day under the pressure of the financial climate, smaller venue closures and a multitude of other reasons. Record companies are being forced to cut back staff and so a lot of long-term colleagues and clients have simply moved on to other career paths. That being said, new bands are emerging all the time, trying to rise up in the oversaturated market that the social media obsessed world has created. With 120,000 new tracks on average being uploaded a day to social media and streaming platforms, you’re going to need a visual edge to stand out, and that’s where I come in. I enjoy giving Kiwi acts that edge.”
