And Justice for Art - a book covering heavy metal album covers, coming soon... (plus it has my first professional design project for Biohazard’s Album No Holds Barred)

The back story

At the age of 18, I was obsessed with Biohazard, a hardcore band from Brooklyn NY, and I mean obsessed - like listening to nothing else for 2 years straight.

I set out on a mission to do their artwork, even if that meant doing it for free. This was in 1995 / 1996 and using AOL I managed to tracked down Billy, Biohazard’s vocalist/guitarist. I then proceeded to bombard him with messages saying I’ll work for free until he finally broke and gave me a shot designing a t-shirt.

Over the next year I ended up designing multiple t-shirts, stickers, and random swag For the band. Then came the big project - a new live album needed a cover design, and holy shit they asked me, and I’m going to get paid!

At the time, the boys were super in to wrestling and wanted to work in a picture of a Mexican wrestler flying through the air. We ended up with a pretty dope album design... but then legal killed the whole thing because we couldn’t get a license to the photo.

So last minute I ran back to all the photos they sent me and found one of Billy putting Nicky (one of their roadies) in a chokehold. After a ton of photoshop work, I had a mask on Billy, and Nicky looking pretty beat up.

While the design makes me cringe now, I would never change a thing, and am forever gratefully for Billy, Danny, Rob, Bobby and Evan for helping me kick off my career.