D. Norsen Design

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D. Norsen Design

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Art Director & Designer. Inspiration & personal work. Clients: Jerry Garcia Estate, Light in the Attic, Aquarium Drunkard ... etc.

09/29/2026

New poster work for Deer Tick - two-nighter New Year’s Party at City Winery Boston! First night celebrates 20 years of War Elephant which is breaking my brain as I have a very vivid memory of hearing that album and being floored that John was the same shy, quiet guy I saw play the corner of an Inman Square bookstore with Viking Moses the year before. Killer album even all these decades later! This poster is an obviously a homage to the album but also those wild pictures of the Boston Science Museum having their dinosaurs delivered by helicopter in 1984. There will be prints available at the show and I will have a small stash of APs after the new year!

09/16/2026

New layout work for cory rayborn - Steve Gunn ‘Sundowner’ reissue. Original artwork by Brad Rose at Digitalis who put out the first cdr which was followed by Harvest Records bespoke vinyl addition. It feels like yesterday I was turned onto this record via the heady days of blogspot mp3 webpages. ‘The guy from GHQ has a solo guitar album? Very cool.’ I got a copy of the Harvest vinyl when it came out in 2010 and really never looked back on actively following Steve’s catalog. It starts here and just beautifully ebbs and flows from there. Admittedly I didn’t have to do too much here. The CD files were pretty clean for being 18 years old so they just needed to be broken out and face lifted to be 4 times bigger. Nothing a little bit of coffee and some elbow grease couldn’t solve. Available now for preorder via cory rayborn !

09/09/2026

New restoration/expanded work for Temporal Drift - Hiroshi Yoshimura ‘Quiet Forest’ lp/cd/cs. It’s an utmost pleasure to work on this lauded (and oft reissue requested) album that has only existed on cd in 1996. It is also Hiroshi’s last album-length work before in passed in 2003 and largely inspired by his trip to the vast forests of the American Pacific Northwest. An aural reflection of the fantastical, surreal beauty he experienced as he walked through the otherworldly wilderness for the first time. For this release I cleaned up the cover and relaid out the text while also adding a series of topographic drawings from Hiroshi’s archives. Also included are reproductions of his handwritten recording notes which are absolutely fascinating and very much art themselves. Complimenting those sketches are the original liner notes in both Japanese and English. Available for preorder now via TD’s Bandcamp - I can’t stress acting on this sooner than later! Also many, many thanks to patrick mccarthy and Yosuke Kitazawa for having me along. We previously worked together on projects at Light in the Attic - but this is our first time in nearly a half decade working together again and it’s a privilege. They are masters of their craft.

09/08/2026

New work for Numero Group - Mineral ‘Might As Well Be Here’ which includes their two seminal and immensely requested reissue albums ‘Endserenading’ and ‘The Power of Failing’ (yes we restored the original font) along with ‘…And What Remains’ which collects singles and demos all in one spot. As always Nina Corcoran wrote an epic and thoroughly deep set of liner notes coupled with a wealth of unseen images and ephemera from the bands archives. This was a design tag team effort with band member Jeremy Gomez and it looks fantastic. Preorders available now!

09/02/2026

New work for Light in the Attic - v/a : ‘A La Altura: Visionary Mexican Music 1977-1999 - Volumes 1 and 2’. Compiled by Mark McNeill and discoscarbon this collection brings together a series of artists from around Mexico who were deeply engaged in bringing forgotten instrumentation into the experimental world. It’s intoxicating and often spell binding music - I have spent hours listing to it the last couple years and finding new bits each time to obsess over. But that’s just the music - what is most important to me about this project is all the paintings are by the legendary graphic designer Eduardo Terrazas whom if you have studied the history of graphic design brought psychedelic design to the world spotlight with his Mexico 1968 Olympic Games design. I was very fortunate to spend an afternoon with Eduardo on a zoom call and it was as incredible as I would have hoped. I took that energy from the call and put it right into the design of the package. Every piece was very deliberately thought out from the palette to the typeface choices. All the photos have been laid into shapes taken from the grids of Eduardo’s painting bringing a visual through line from the front of the package to the back. I am immensely proud of this work and it’s a thrill to share it today after a couple years of being quiet about it. Preorders (with and without merch) are available now!

09/01/2026

New poster work for Sierra Ferrell for tonight’s show at Stage AE in Pittsburgh! I had a lot of fun working on this poster - so much there is actually two others that didn’t make the cut but I think are really great too. Maybe they will see the light of day in the future? But regardless this one is a homage to ketchup, tomatoes (green and red), famed resident Andy Warhol and all those incredible bridges that lead you into the city. I have only been to Pittsburgh twice and fondly remember a massively drunk night with my college classmates where we found a deli open at 3am that made us a brown grocery bag full of fries. Impressive. Then the next morning hungover at the Warhol museum we played in a room full of silver balloons. Pittsburgh is an A+++++ city in my book. I’ll have APs shortly - drop a DM if interested!

08/26/2026

New poster work for Chris Stapleton / All-American Road Show - tonight’s poster for their show with CARTER FAITH at Jones Beach Theater! This completes the unofficial ‘triptych’ of summer posters. Each connected in old county fair esqe design. This one was the tricky one as it was obvious what the animal should be for the other two while Long Island didn’t have an immediate one but being married to a Strong Island women I have heard my fair share of ocean and beach stories. So this is a homage to the magnificent beasts that live off the coast - docile and the size of a bus: the Humpback Whale. Available tonight at the show I have a small stash of APs available. Drop a DM if interested.

08/22/2026

Field trip report - after many years of discussing and daydreaming about a trip to Bread and Puppet Theater I loaded my kids in the car and we took the 2.5 hour drive from Boston today. I have shared my love for Bread and Puppet here before but to visit the museum while having a guided tour by an early member of the group was just plain incredible. There is so much to take in. It’s visually and mentally daunting but inspiring none the less. Peter and Elka created their own visual world while inviting so many others and their immediate community to participate too. Afterwards we saw the last performance of ‘Morality Demonology’ and it was just otherworldly to see it performed in their own theatre. That will live rent free in my head for years to come. Today we also visited the site of Betty and Barney Hill’s UFO abduction in NH and the Dog Chapel in St Johnsbury where we left a note and some of the Oldie Goldie’s hair. He was born just up the road and it was important to my family to bring a little piece of him back to his only other home. As I said to my kid’s on the ride back home to the hotel - ‘we really lived to VT to the fullest today.’

08/19/2026

New design work for outside time - geobriensystem / Kyle Simon The Sirens ‘Hunter’s Moon’. It’s honor to work on this multidimensional release. From it’s recording on the namesake’s celestial evening at The Farrington Observatory on October 17, 2024 to Lily Stockman beautiful painting and finally it’s release on Jonathan Williger - it was a collective of friends working on a very cerebral and time bending release. In discussing the design idea with Kyle and Brian we kept coming back to a mutual interest in New Age cassette designs of the 1980s. We wanted it to feel open and inviting but also eye catching. The main typeface was sourced from a vintage typeface book and laid letter by letter to create a natural tension. Not seen in these photos is the second side of the liner notes which we laid out vertically so the type leads you the opening of the observatory. Don’t curse me when you have to flip it and read it the long way like a newspaper. We like to make you work for your liner notes around these parts! Now available for Bandcamp preorder!

08/12/2026

New deluxe reissue work for No Quarter - Joan Shelley (with Nathan Salsburg) ‘Over and Even’ now with a second lp of incredible demos. This beautiful album was mine and many people’s introduction to Joan so it’s a thrill to be tasked to expand the design (additional images) and put some bells and whistles (metallic inks) on it. The original 2015 design was by Mark Ohe - a legend in his own right. Check those 90/00s Matador Records design credits and you will understand. Now available for preorder!

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Waltham, MA
02451

Telephone

(857) 540-6564

Website

http://www.dnorsen.com/

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