IDMf 20-Year Anniversary Compilation Cover Art Submission Guidelines
(Title TBD)
Twenty years of making sounds and hastling each other to death. It’s time to celebrate it with what we do best, making more music and art!
We’re opening submissions for visual artists to help define the face of the IDMf 20-Year Anniversary open-genre compilation.
If your work understands our large body of music we want to see it. For inspiration, check out the amazing art of our past releases at https://idmfnetlabel.bandcamp.com/
File formats: PNG or JPG preferred
TIFF accepted if reasonable.
Color space: RGB preferred
Submission Process
All final submissions must be uploaded via Google Drive, accessed through a Google Form.
Form access password:
BleepBloop20
One primary image per submission.
If you have alternate versions, note this in the form rather than uploading multiples.
Submissions posted only on the forum will not be considered official entries.
Forum Previews
Artists are welcome to post preview images in the artwork discussion thread.
Please note that IDMf’s server has strict file size limits, so previews should be compressed or externally hosted.
Forum previews are encouraged for feedback and discussion but do not replace formal submission through the Drive.
Creative Direction
This is an open-genre compilation representing 20 years of IDMf.
We’re looking for artwork that:
Feels timeless but not nostalgic
Reflects experimental music culture without imitation
Balances machine logic and human imperfection
Holds up at album-cover scale
All visual styles are welcome: abstract, illustrative, photographic, typographic, or hybrid.
Text is optional—only include it if it serves the concept.
Licensing & Rights
All submissions must be released under Creative Commons.
By submitting, you confirm:
You are the original creator
You have the right to release the work under a Creative Commons license
The selected artist will receive full credit wherever the artwork is used.
Selection Process
One image will be selected as the official compilation cover.
Selection is based on:
Fit with the music and overall compilation vibe
Conceptual clarity and originality
Visual impact at small and large scales
Art is subjective. Make something honest and let it stand on its own.
My submissions are good to go for personal projects, too; see this for more info
As always, my stuff is fair game to remix or rework, and whatever doesn’t get selected here can be used / remixed in your own projects as well. I’m just using my camera as source material, so I can safely pass the pixels onto you
I don’t have the skills to implement this. But I think one way to go is to take all the covers and maybe add screenshots of favorite forum posts and flamewars and such, and collage it all together so small that it just looks like noise.
I can do that with Processing very easily. Send 'em over
It helps if they’re kind of standard (otherwise it’ll either be a matter of clipping and / or scaling to make things uniform), but I can also just kind of autocrop the fuck out of things to make them all some standard size and play around with it. Sounds fun.
Also, if I just render it really huge, each image could be pretty large so that we can zoom into it and stare at it in awe. Bandcamp probably won’t allow such a huge upload, but it can always exist officially elsewhere
i dunno, i’ve been thinking of a piece that leans more into body horror. nothing extreme since i can’t handle that type of horror too much. something like a person melding with some type of big electronic structure. probably a huge modular synth to tie the themes together. its gonna be pixel art since i think thats cool. i’ll probably post a sketch later.
put together a really rough sketch. trying to not make my character designs as abstract as what i usually do. i specialize in abstract surrealism type stuff. basically art that’s weird and unsettling.
With the new submission guidelines in place, if anyone wants me to send something through the grinder (my unofficial name for whatever I rapidly do to images) just tag / DM me and I’ll get to it. It’ll be yours to submit, your credit and all of that stuff, and you can even rework iterations to your liking. I just enjoy the remixing process and making weird stuff .
I’m also not going to submit anything, since I had a ton of fun doing the last one and don’t want to hog up the tubes, so anything I toss up here otherwise can be used in your submissions as remix fodder or whatever else you want to do with them.
I’ve still got just enough (albeit diminishing) time for some weird scripting and shit, so if I can help your process in any way, send it over!
