Childhood Doodles
I grew up in an artistic family. My mother was a graphic designer, and her father was an art director at Reader's Digest. So I was inspired from an early age to doodle, draw and come up with my own visual pastimes.
Nu-Metal Beginnings
As far as I can remember, this was the very first Disasterpeace logo, and a strange album cover to go with it ... dirty dishes?
These are from January of 2003. I was really into dirty textures and photoshop brushes at the time. I was 16. Initially I had plans to start a band with this name. Here's a web banner I made from the same time:
I'm not sure why I put "fight the enemy", except to chalk it up to some typical imported teenage angst from that time. If you have a microscope you may also note the gibberish reference id under disasterpiece. But you can see from the beginning I had ideas about doing something with the complementary shapes of the d and the p. Later that year in May, I revisited this design (left). And then once more I revisited it a year later (right), at the ripe age of 18 in September of 2004, right around the time I went off to college to study design:
The one with the man is kinda neat, though I question where the rest of his body went. I had a habit of never getting past making splash pages, let along starting a band.
Stepping Out
Finally, in April of 2005, fresh off dropping out of design college, I came up with the first logo that I would actually use in public:
I was 19. This logo served me well for over 3 years. Here's a bit of artwork from the very first version of my website, which used to be hosted at dprocks.com:
I was really into pattern dithering back then, and there are many other pieces I made that have it.
Disastertron
After creating the album #NEUTRALITE with spamtron in 2006, the following year I was inspired to try to create a proper logo for our collaborations. Unfortunately we never really worked together again after that, but I did end up making this logo called the "tronman", which was very obviously inspired by MSTRKRFT, and more broadly the house rock movement of that time:
Skeletal Introduction
By the time I was 22, I had graduated from anatomical pictures of faces to skulls. In December of 2008, while working on a new version of my website, I also gave my logo a refresh, going for something a bit more abstract:
I lovingly called this the "moon skull". I played around with lots of different color schemes ... this one made it onto my revamped website:
While this more naturalistic one made it onto a t-shirt. This particular color scheme is immortalized in my memory because I stumbled into John Romero wearing it one year at Indiecade. I'm not even sure if he was aware of my music at the time!
The Permaclassic
In 2012 my life changed pretty dramatically - I had just moved to California the previous fall, and the release of FEZ in the spring was the turning point of my career. Around this time I started doodling ideas for what my next logo would be. I really wanted to simplify my look, and try to create something that had multiple layers to it. I knew I wanted to capture the skull, the d and p, as well as the idea of music:
I eventually moved this process to the computer and explored many different ideas, which I have never shown until now:
That one on the right is kinda cool and familiar... In July of 2012 at the age of 26 I ultimately settled on what I thought was the simplest and most elegant version of the logo, lovingly called "the monogram":
I also found a blue that I thought suited the mark nicely as a default color (though I've since experimented with lots of color combinations for it.) I filled in both eyes for starters. Besides being the letters d and p for Disasterpeace, those forms also fulfill two other functions: skull eyes and quarter notes. The mouth and nose of the skull are also meant to evoke something like a metronome, or a metering device of some kind. So altogether, the logo suggests 3 (maybe 3¼) meanings.
Esoteric Tribute
My sister had a thing for owls, and after her passing in 2017 I looked for some way to pay tribute to her. This mark is taken from the cover of Disasters for Piano, which was drawn and designed by Nicolas Menard. We've collaborated together many times over the years, on projects like #Somewhere, #Loop Ring Chop Drink, and originally this →ARTV logo spot.
I've used this mark on rare occassion in promotional materials. While originally the stems of the eyes both went upwards, maybe to signify eyebrows, by flipping the right one you get some dp action. It was also around this time that I probably got deepest into abstracting things, and so its name "Doblenegra" was born. The idea behind it was to mean "double black", which sounded owl-ish to me. But also, en Español, "negra" is another way of saying the musical duration of a quarter note — so "double quarter note" seems to fit. This mark plays more on abstract symbolism, as opposed to the more visual cues that come from marks like the monogram.
Boredom and More Esoterica
In 2019 I did some merch collaboration with Yetee Records. I collaborated with artist Drew Wise on artwork for a #Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar vinyl. Drew had done the artwork for the #Hyper Light Drifter vinyl as well. At this stage it had been 7 years or so since I came up with the monogram, and I thought it might be fun to find a new mark for Disasterpeace. We worked closely, experimenting with lots of ideas before landing on this compelling mark, which manages to suggest
even more meanings than the monogram. I called it "the output mask":
This logo also manages to work regardless of whether the lines are light or dark. At the time I was hung up on the idea that the monogram only worked when the eyes were dark, because that correctly conveys the idea of darkness in the eyes, like a traditional skull drawing. I eventually got over this restriction.
In the output mask logo, the d and p, as well as the skull eyes remain, but the music notes have been changed to be an eighth note and a fancy looking quarter. The nose has been removed completely, and the skull has been more explicitly drawn, and given a forward looking expression. The skull also reaches a rightwards point, to suggest an arrow. I also thought it suggested output, which is a key idea in music and audio, as well as "moving forward". But it also seemed to me that this inclusion created the illusion of a mask, which I worked with Drew to emphasize with a gradient. In some ways this whole mask idea is at odds with the idea of moving forward, because wearing a mask and not revealing your true self can be hindering. So in that way, the logo is a bit of a paradox. The moniker Disasterpeace, is of course, also a paradox - two disparate ideas coming together. I still use this logo in lesser places, sort of like how hockey teams somtimes have alternate logos on the shoulders of their jerseys.
Classic Refresh
Ultimately, I've stuck with the monogram design, even as I was tinkering with the idea of using the "output mask". After the pandemic I felt strongly that my website needed a bit of a refresh. One of the ideas I played with back in 2019 when creating merch was a tiled monogram shirt. I began to play with this idea more:
I liked the idea of how this mark is still identifiable, but gets lost in abstraction when you look at it in a tiled format. It will still pop out at you though, if you look for it. A version of this made its way onto this site as the backdrop for the home page.
Finding a Visual Outlet
Creating logos and other designs has always been an interest of mine, ever since I was very small, and so it's only been natural that I've sought to keep that passion alive in ways that are supplemental to my music.