So-Me (Bertrand de Langeron) is a Parisian Graphic Designer and Art Director for Ed Banger Records. The label is home to acts such as Justice, Mr Flash, Busy P and So-Me himself, and has worked with the likes of Kanye West and Daft Punk. So-Me coordinates all the music video and album art for Ed Banger Records.
So-Me works a lot with hand drawn typography, creating interesting and unique work, as all his typography is done by hand, two pieces will never be the same. So-Me’s ability to quite quickly produce these hand done typography pieces is what has helped make him so successful.
Ed Banger records dramatically rose in fame in 2007 when they managed to sign a number of new artists, most notably French electronic group Justice. The music video So-Me created for their rework of ‘Never Be Alone’ by Simian, won the award for best video at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2006.
This is famously remembered after Kanye West stormed the stage complaining that his expensive music video was better than Ed Banger Record’s. This then provoked a re-designed spoof cover by So-Me.
In the end Kanye West hired So-Me to create the music video for his song ‘Good Life’, which turned into an instant success.
So-Me also created the cover art for the song, which I feel isn’t as strong as his previous design work as he uses a lot of existing typefaces instead of completely hand done typography which is what made his work so unique.
In my current project, Design and Composition, So-Me’s work has helped me as it has given me some good inspiration and showed me the importance of hand done type, showing how when used properly it can have a much greater effect then computer created type. The way he positions his type and controls his designs even when they contain so much text, has shown me what can be accomplished if the composition is thought about. I have looked at creating a design similar to So-Me’s Ed Banger Records design (below) for my first page of my double page spread.
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