The guy behind some of the best current music artwork, SEEN Studio

An old soul such as myself appreciates when modern-day designers and illustrators go out of their way to make something look like it fell out of a cardboard box that hasn’t been opened since 1972. When I first came across SEEN I was convinced it was a whole group of people, but it turns out it’s just one really talented guy called Rob Carmichael. He alone is responsible for creating some of the best album artwork around at the moment.

Steering clear of the mainstream, Rob is responsible for making us unable to resist buying vinyl by the likes of Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, Dan Deacon, Ducktails and Real Estate to name but a few. A lot of designers jump on the retro aesthetic bandwagon to achieve a certain level of cool when designing sleeves, but I doubt many would go to as much trouble as SEEN did on that Peter Matthew Bauer cover. You can almost smell the in-depth research and manual labour that went into it. This kind of stuff is basically the reason why I get up in the morning.