“I started back in the early ’ 80s,” he says. Working from his home studio, he designs logos for bands all over the world. Szpajdel has designed over 6, 000 logos over the years, earning himself the nickname ‘Lord of the Logos’. Think of the note-perfect, epic feel of Iron Maiden and their logo’s parallel lines and mathematical precision, or the brutal barking of Napalm Death and the dense, messy chaos of theirs.Ī lot of lives were changed by taking a chance on a band because the way they wrote their name looked badass.Įmperor’s famous, influential logo was designed by Christophe Szpajdel, a Belgian artist now living in Exeter.
Some look like demonic scrawlings, some like futuristic otherworldly messages, but they’re more than just branding, more than just a logo to slap on a T‑shirt and a couple of patches: a logo is a statement of intent. Bands had to do what they could visually – a band name could offer some guidance, or an album title, but in the world of metal, logos did a lot of the heavy lifting.īlack metal bands, death metal bands, grindcore bands and other inhabitants of the extreme end of the metal scale have ended up developing fantastic logos, from the savagely complex to the incredibly simple. Sifting through piles of tapes or endless shelves of records trying to discover something new, you didn’t have a lot to go on - particularly in more niche subgenres that didn’t get any press coverage. It seems unthinkable, obviously, but there was once a time when you didn’t have all the music ever recorded, and all the information about it anyone could ever want, at your fingertips. Imagine, if you can, a time before the internet.
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