[Ed note: This is essen­tially a repost of my pre­vi­ous posts about this topic, but now in permanent-link page form, instead of post form, so I can update it every year with new cover art. It’s fun, and now handy, too!]

Click on each thumb­nail for the 600 x 600 pixel version.

2013

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2012 by Darien Kruss

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2011

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2010

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2009

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2008

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2007 by Ben Mil­lett

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2006

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2005

SXSW (aka, South by South­west) is a music, film, and inter­ac­tive media fes­ti­val held in March of every year in Austin, Texas. They draw hun­dreds of bands to play for a week in Austin, at just about every bar and venue avail­able. But the best part is that the orga­niz­ers offer up one track from just about every band, for down­load, free. Sev­eral hun­dred tracks of some of the newest, fresh­est, most inter­est­ing bands out there. (There seems to be a lot of thrash metal, too, but to each his own.)

This year’s best source for the music files (linked from Greg Hewgill’s site) is once again this one: Home of the (UNOFFICIAL) SXSW Tor­rents.

I have down­loaded these tracks every year since 2005, and I plan to con­tinue doing so, even though weed­ing through them for the real gems takes a long time (and I’m a cou­ple of years behind). But one thing that has always both­ered me, espe­cially now with Cov­er­flow in iTunes, is that there’s no cover art asso­ci­ated with the songs. SXSW doesn’t offer any up (though that may change), and when I went look­ing online, I found just one: Ben Mil­lett made a 600 x 600 pixel JPEG of the 2007 web site art that he uses as a cover. He gen­er­ously let me have it, and after adding it to iTunes, I liked it so much I decided to make cov­ers for the other years.

I’m not try­ing to be fan­tas­ti­cally cre­ative. I do some Inter­net spelunk­ing to find SXSW mar­ket­ing pdf mate­ri­als with graph­ics I can slice and dice in Pho­to­shop. I’m just try­ing to adapt the iden­tity already cre­ated for each year. The 2009 and 2008 mate­ri­als were really easy to do. Ben did 2007, and 2006 was not that hard. 2005 was a real pain though, as the art is all hor­i­zon­tal and dif­fi­cult to mush into a square. Still I man­aged some­thing I am mostly pleased with.

I do encour­age you to come up with your own. I’ll even host them, if I like them. This seems like the sort of thing ripe for the Intar­webs to tackle. If you make some­thing cool, send it to me. Thanks to Darien Kruss for the 2012 cover art. And some­one tell SXSW they need to stop using that green color. They’re in a rut.

2013 is a per­fect exam­ple of what I mean. Same font, same col­ors, basi­cally the same design. I used Pix­el­ma­tor this time, and with a newish com­puter it was a breeze. I knocked out the 2013 design in about fif­teen min­utes. (Please see the note above about my lack of cre­ative ambi­tion with this project: still intact.) Now I’m home with a sick kid, and I have the time to work on it some more, but I’m okay pleased with what I did last night. I have a 1200 x 1200 pixel ver­sion, but unless there is a hue and cry, I expect to leave it in the hopper.

For now, I present to you, for your down­load­ing plea­sure, cover art for the SXSW Show­cas­ing Artists for the years 2005–2013. I have no idea what the copy­right nature of the orig­i­nal mate­ri­als are, so I am loathe to attach any copy­right, Cre­ative Com­mons or oth­er­wise, to these images. Just know that I don’t care what you do with them.