Van Jumper Design

Restated Question:
How can abstract, formal, and typographic experimentation help make old blues music accessible and attractive to new listeners?

Visual Landscape:
First off, if you google the blues:

Lots of black, white. and blue

Vintage Album Covers:

Modern album covers:

Vintage Blues posters:

Modern Blues posters and publicity:

Grego has brought the formal qualities to a hip printed illustrative
quality but still relies on the image of the musician

Formal inspiration:

rhetorical trope: women = death?

Cal Arts Inspiration (gracias señor Galloway for the tip):

On Formalism:

"…is no transcendent meaning to that discipline other than the literal content created by a practitioner. For example, formalists within mathematic claim that mathematics is no more than the symbols written down by the mathematician, which is based on logic and a few elementary rules alone."

"Formalists within a discipline are completely concerned with "the rules of the game," as there is no other external truth that can be achieved beyond those given rules."

"… formalism can be applied to a set of notations and rules for manipulating them which yield results in agreement with experiment or other techniques of calculation … no mathematical semantics exists, the calculations are often said to be purely formal."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(philosophy)

"… a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form—the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content."

"… comprehending a work of art is contained within the work of art. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance."

"… that 'eidos' (or shape) of a thing included our perceptions of the thing, as well as those sensory aspects of a thing which the human mind can take in."

"… the mental processes and social preconceptions an individual brings to art are more important than the essential, or 'ideal', nature of the thing. Knowledge is created only through socialization and thought, they said, and a thing can only be known as it is filtered through these mental processes."

"… became used by the Bolsheviks (Soviets) for any kind of art that was for its own sake. It became a dirty word like "art for art's sake,"

"… Platonic definition for Form as a collection of elements which falsely represent the thing itself and which are mediated by art and mental processes. A second view argues that representational elements must be somewhat intelligible, but must still aim to capture the object's 'Form'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(art)

Dieter Rams Good design:

is innovative
makes a product useful
aesthetic
makes a product understandable
is unobtrusive
is honest
is long-lasting
is thorough down to the last detail
is environmentally-friendly
is as little design as possible

https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design

'Form is not the goal but the result of our work.' Fads are governed by the same immutable laws of form as are other visual phenomena. Wishful thinking will not make them go away; and one can no more escape from the exigencies of form than from one's shadow. To poke fun at form or formalism is to poke fun at Roger Fry, Clive Bell, John Dewey, and the philosophy called aesthetics. Ironically, it also pokes fun at trendy design, since the devices which characterize this style of 'decoration' are, primarily, formal. Furthermore, it denies what the great historian, painter, and architect of the Renaissance, Vasari,9 had already stated about design (form): 'It is the animating principle of all creative processes.'
http://www.mkgraphic.com/chaos.html

Possible Solutions and artifacts:

modernized posters to be hung in music heavy locations
modernized album covers to compete next to current music
campaign using modern tech
illustrative style based on song lyrics
use of rhetorical tropes to display meaning/ subjects found in songs
typographic manipulations (to show angst, loneliness, love, debt, religion, melancholia)
abstraction of subjects (same ones as listed in typographic manipulations)

Feedback From Marty:

Start looking into formal rules I can play with. This will be a large part of my project.
Look into the design of modern blues albums.
How to get the point of sale? (getting this to kids)