Machine Shop: The Hype Machine Team Blog

Now that all 50 illustrations for the Top 50 artists have been revealed, I thought I would share how we ended up with this gorgeous, inspired gallery of music artwork.

Some of the artists are friends. Some—Khoi Vinh (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart), Mike Perry (Grizzly Bear)—are personal heroes. Hannah Donovan (LCD Soundsystem) masterfully designs our UK bff, Last.fm. The many excellent cartoonists—r stevens (Bloc Party), Jamie McKelvie (La Roux), Dan Meth (Kanye West), Tom Humberstone (Iron & Wine), Julia Scheele (Florence + The Machine), Meredith Gran (The xx)—are a nod to years spent reading webcomics. I met Noah Kalina (The Big Pink) in a Blockles battle, and Josh Gosfield (Bob Dylan) while waiting for Ratatat to go on at The Music Hall of Williamsburg. Yiying Lu (Michael Jackson) made the Twitter fail whale! Deastro’s (Metric) music is frequently discussed on the Hype Machine, but I don’t think that many people knew about his killer collage work (he does his own album art, too).

But most of all, I looked through the wealth of talent being shared on artist communities like Eat, Sleep, Draw, as well as indexhibit and Flickr, and asked artists to recommend friends. The result is a collection of artwork as awesome and diverse as the music in our charts. But I know that everyone has starting doodling something of their own while lost in a song, so share it! Upload it to Flickr, post it on your blog, show us how you interpret your music. Here’s a different take on Vampire Weekend, for starters: