May '26
Monthly design, film, and music roundup for May 2026.
Woah… it’s already the end of the month. June is HERE. Welcome back to the newsletter everyone! Summer is just about in full swing, allergies are ramping up and the streets are smelling like hot sewage and straight up garbage. Yay! Took a 30 minute walk last week and the heat was sweltering, but it felt nice to be outside and walking through the neighborhood. When the weather is nice and I'm inside working on a computer I kind of feel insane (this is happening as I type this).
DESIGN
Bright Eyes is doing a 21st anniversary tour for I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, and Conor’s lovely team reached out and asked me to make a girly crop top design of emo Conor from back in the day. I loved this idea and had so much fun with it… Wide Awake is one of my favorite albums, it’s one of the first records I ever owned. I spun it on my terrible Crosley record player from UO all the time. Poison Oak is one of my favorite songs on the album, so using lyrics and imagery from this track was necessary. Hopefully the twee millennials like this one. You can get it at the merch stand during the shows, or pre-order one from their merch webstore.
Ever since starting full time at a record label 3 years ago, time is measured by album campaigns. It’s hard to see it any other way, because as a designer you spend so much time developing the concept for this album cycle, getting knee deep in the record packaging, and designing seemingly endless marketing material in both physical and digital spaces. You’re patiently waiting for the day everything you’ve been working on behind the scenes can exist in the world. This project is definitely one of them! I had the privilege of working on some design development and marketing pieces for MUNA’s awesome new 80s inspired synth pop record, Dancing On The Wall.
Full creative team:
Creative Direction: Justin Moran
Photography: Elliot Weaver
Art Direction: Nick Scott
Justin brought a cohesive vision to the art team, one inspired by a raw, confrontational, candid, and sweaty late 70s/early 80s east side post-punk aesthetic. Nick and I also brought our own inspirations from that era into the mix, referencing of course Gang of Four and a bit of Talking Heads.
Keeping the already familiar MUNA logo, we started playing with weird cropping and obscuring the logo to make it more playful and referential of that late 70s punk record packaging feeling. It’s as if the logo was misaligned, printed and cut incorrectly, appearing in multiple places on the page by mistake.
It’s been super rewarding to see this album kick off, all of the listening events with freebies, billboards in LA, and seeing fans at the shows wearing merch for the album.
I’ve been working on a new setlist for another gig I have coming up, and I was of course excited to make another flyer for it! Erotika is really becoming a huge creative outlet for me outside of my day to day design work. It’s also letting me explore a style of design I’ve always been interested in, this sort of 80s newspaper b&w graphics on colored paper look. I’ve been collecting inspo from vintage escort cards, adult magazines, and the Internet Archive. The branding is really coming together! This flyer I think is my favorite so far. At first I designed the cards digitally, but I thought it would look sooooo much better if I just made the cards for real, and scanned them in. I printed these on Astrobrights cardstock paper using my laser printer at home. They’re all double sided cards, which was an alignment nightmare. Something about an at-home printer really is not accurate for paper alignment. I wasted a lot of ink but the end result was worth it!
MOVIES
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2026) dir. Matt Johnson ☆☆☆☆☆
What can I say that hasn’t been said already about these two…. a few weeks ago I got REALLY into the Canadian web series/show Nirvanna The Band The Show after watching Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. I try to tell anyone about this movie or the Vice show and as I’m saying the name I can see the light drain from their eyes. If you like tv shows like Nathan For You, The Rehearsal, How To with John Wilson, I Think You Should Leave, you absolutely need to do a deep dive into this. There’s so much content too, since it started as a webseries in the mid 2000s before getting picked up by Vice for 2 seasons in 2016. I’ve been watching the web series/commentary plus all the deleted scenes on this fan made website, and the Vice series on an undisclosed Google Drive source (email me idk). I’ve also been watching Matt’s other films— The Dirties (awesome), rewatched BlackBerry (good), Matt and Mara (good)…. it’s been a time. Pleaseeeee check out the movie. It seamlessly blends hilarious public improvisation, integrated special effects, and re-contextualized archival footage from their own show 20 years prior. I was constantly bouncing from “how the hell did they do that” to “this is so genius”…….. you don’t have to have any context of the show or have seen the show to see the movie. I’ve very much enjoyed becoming obsessed with this world so if you’re into it also, DM/email me or something haha lol haha….
My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres (2019)
Julio explores his favorite shapes presented via an industrial conveyer belt in front of an audience, using each object to tell an anecdote or joke. I don’t usually like comedy specials but this one is different (because its about shapes duh). The production design and styling was also super spectacular and right up my alley. Julio has a surreal, dreamlike, almost like wacky pomo/postmodern visual style to his work (Problemista also felt like this), and that’s exactly what I was picking up here. His ability to anthropomorphize objects and create comical world building is very David Byrne-esque which explains why I love it. I still haven’t seen his other special, Color Theories, but I have seen clips of it. Next up on the list!
The Backrooms (Found Footage) dir. Kane Parsons
One thing about me is I’m gonna rewatch all of the Backrooms videos before seeing the movie. Even on rewatch I’m so blown away by all of these videos being created in Blender. As a deep appreciator and lover of all things creepy on the internet, whether it’s fictional horror on r/LetsNotMeet or Creepypasta videos, I cannot tell you how much I’ve been anticipating the movie. I’ve seriously waited… I think two years for this. Since there were whisperings it was happening. So crazy! Lo-fi/analog horror is one of the only subgenres of horror that truly gets to me (The Blair Witch Project, Skinamarink, Pulse, Inland Empire, among others). So I don’t care what other people think of this movie because it’s kind of made in a lab for me. You guys just don’t get it okay….
A LOT of people know about Kane’s found footage video for Backrooms but not a lot have also watched The Oldest View series which is just as creepy.
EDIT: ok so since starting this month’s newsletter I have seen the movie. If I decide to cover it I’m at least waiting until next month since it only came out a few days ago <3 I think next month I’m going to do a deep dive on here about my favorite haunted videos on the internet anyway so it’ll fit perfectly.
In honor of the new film, I dug up some photographs I took for my junior seminar project in college when I was exploring liminal spaces. I used to drive around at night photographing storefronts under construction and in transitory states.
MUSIC
Albums I listened to:
Theft World — Lip Critic
Crisis Talk — Spike Hellis
Cavallo — Automelodi
i’ve seen a way — Mandy, Indiana
Been getting back into that Mandy, Indiana record because it’s a real ~liminal~ feeling record, since it was recorded in caves, crypts, shopping malls, etc. It feels very dreamlike with a menacing edge.
INSPO
Stumbled across this really amazing typeface by In-House called Serrucho. It’s this really wacky variable typeface that feels like it belongs on the cover of a New Wave or Italo Disco record. I love when type becomes a little illegible and reads more like an abstract shape!
Okay I’m not writing any more than this because it’s getting long. See you next month!
