Dangerous Minds pal, Los Angeles-based architect John Bertram, is sponsoring a new design contest at his Nabokov-obsessed blog, Venus febriculosa. This time, however, the contest is to create alternate art for Brian Eno’s decidedly minimalist (in every respect) Music For Films:

Brian Eno’s album covers have always tended toward the interesting, (one or two I find exceptional, notably Music for Airports), and he was fortunate to count work by the brilliant artists Tom Phillips and Russell Mills among them. On some level, however, the covers have always seemed more intent on establishing Eno’s artistic, intellectual, and theoretical bona fides (and, especially with the earlier albums, his overall weirdness) than anything else. The cover for Music for Films, however, is radically different.  Not so much designed as intentionally left blank, the chocolate brown Helvetica text is pushed to the extreme upper edges of the texture-less and indescribably beige cover (the same text layout was used to good effect for the Cluster collaborations After the Heat and Begegnungen). This apotheosis of neutrality avoided the plain brown wrapper look in favor of what in retrospect seems closer to the generic packaging popular in grocery stores in the late ‘70s (or perhaps a reference color from Interiors, Woody Allen’s beige-est Bergman-esque film, also from 1978). Importantly, the cover is not ‘conceptual’ in the way that Richard Hamilton’s design for The Beatles’ White Album is, nor has it the cool rigor and studied minimalism of any number of ECM or Factory Records covers that – brilliant as they are (and they are brilliant) – somehow appear positively baroque in comparison. Rather, music and cover co-exist nicely as a unit, the latter providing no commentary on the former (or anything else for that matter), simply existing as a visual analogue to the wordless music. It’s a nice conceit.

The contest will be judged by Geeta Dayal, staff writer at Wired.com and author of Another Green World; famed graphic designer and typeface maven, Frith Kerr; Medicine man and former DM blogger Brad Laner, who contributed to Brian Eno’s Another Day on Earth album; Russell Mills, artist; illustrator and Eno collaborator on More Dark Than Shark and cultural critic Rick Poynor, who also collaborated with Mills and Eno on More Dark than Shark.

There are a lot of DM readers who are both graphic designers and Eno fans, so get your engines started. Deadline for entry is September 1, 2012 and the winner will receive $500 (and some additional Eno-related prizes that have yet to be announced.)

Go to Venus febriculosa.for more information.