Cooldaddy Media Music Design
Cooldaddy Media has been about music and graphics since its earlier incarnations as Zebra Tone, Incorporated in the early 1980s, The Coleman Group in the late 1980s, Coleman CyberArts in early 1990s and in its current incarnation ever since. Bringing music to a design sensibility has been at the core of the Cooldaddy Media aesthetic. There have been over 5000 of at leat 50 crude poster designs that once graced (or defaced, depending on your point of view) the public spaces of the Washington-Maryland-Virginia area in the 1980s and one day, those archives will be scanned and presented as a legacy of that aesthetic. But, until that time, here are some designs and stories from the last fifteen years.
Cooldaddy Media CD Covers
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Okay, so one has only to look at the music pages of this website to see most of these designs but there are a few that bear further review. |
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Back in the the mid 1990s, Cooldaddy Media did some design work with React Records and this Techno compilation was one of the results. The artwork is actually the scanned motherboard of a MAC IIfx. |
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Big Black Nun was a great alternative band in Washington, DC in the mid 1990s. This CD cover is a trifold of the Washington, DC skyline created in Bryce, that great 3D program. Cooldaddy Media also designed the band’s logo, cassette covers and many a concert poster and newspaper ads. When digitized, they will become part of the archive. |
Cooldaddy Media Music Banners
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Garageband.com marketing on Myspace.comHere are a series of banners created when The Absolution singles were recognized as Track of the Day on Garageband.com back in 2007. These banners were used as marketing tools on MySpace.com. Those original mixes are still available on MySpace and Garageband, but more modern mixes are available on TheAbsolution.com website. |
Cooldaddy Media Music Writing
So this is a funny place to put music writing in an art/graphics category but, this is a funny website. Cooldaddy's founder, Stuart Coleman, was in 1987-88, the editor of the Duckberg Times, a pivotal music and arts bi-weekly in Washington, DC. Based on his strengths in publishing the original Cooldaddy Magazine in 1985-86, he was brought on as a writer/ad rep and in a few months took over the editorial position. He interviewed such bands as Poison, Fuzzbox, Ruin, Los Lobos, Plasmatics and many others. After moving to Hollywood in 1991 he hooked up with Raymon Roker, the publisher of URB magazine (and Jason Bentley, then of KXLU now of KCRW fame). At that time URB was a large format free tabloid newspaper, before it became the glossy nationwide publication it became. Stuart was tired of listening to the drivel of rock bands yammering the same inanity and decided to cross over and bring a fresh voice to the hip-hop generation. While there, he wrote cover stories on DJ Marques Wyatt, and a few hip hop bands but the record reviews from 1991 are a fun blast into the past and reflect an oblique sensibility into dance and rap music. At the same time, he was also writing record reviews for Entertainment Today, another free entertainment magazine. To read these old reviews (Since they are already html'd from the early 1990s) click here!