They Might Be Giants – I Like Fun album art
Cover art for I Like Fun, the twentieth (!) studio album from alt-rock band They Might Be Giants. This cover was designer Paul Sahre’s fifth collaboration with the band, having also designed covers for Phone Power (2016), Glean (2015), Nanobots (2013) and Join Us (2011).
TMBG has a long history of type-centric album covers (see Barbara Glauber’s work on Factory Showroom), but I Like Fun is perhaps the most typographically daring. Cyrus Highsmith’s Prensa is joyfully sliced and diced in a strange staggered style reminiscent of both the handcut pasteboard design techniques of old and digital glitch effects. Sahre’s process (albeit not the creation of the final cover) is shown in this short promotional clip.
This jittery treatment appears random at first glance but is actually very smart about its treatment of letterforms, strategically making cuts across counters and crossbars to push the envelope of readability on each individual glyph while maintaining an overall composition that, as all good album covers of the 21st century must, reads even at small scale.
The album peaked at #108 on the U.S. Billboard charts.
1 Comment on “They Might Be Giants – I Like Fun album art”
It slipped my mind that Sahre made a cover using the same process (and Prensa again) for TMBG’s non-streaming EP My Murdered Remains: