Music Video In Progress

Good Luck to the Class of 2024

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Page Directory

★ Filter through pressing hashtags - #coursework, #writing, etc. 

★ Green underlines indicate hyperlinks, press to get redirected 

★ Blog is organised in chronological order

★ Thank you!

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Final Work (Click to find)

★Final Film

★Digipak

★Social Media Page

Main Page Blog

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Evaluation

Film Evaluation Year 13 Coursework

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Social Media Post Analysis

Following the way of Death Grips' quirky, unconventional use of social media, my artist's marketing campaign is largely offbeat, obtuse and weird.

Texts Posts

As Spacehey utilises the blog format, I could demonstrate their personality and values through their text language. Through spelling, punctuation and text errors, I communicated the my artist's utter lack of seriousness and authenticity.

Being eccentric

I decided to have my artist utilise a highly ironic, near anarchic use of social media when not promoting their music. This way, their target audience sees their offbeat personalities as well as the authentic weirdness of their everyday lives without revealing too much personal information, diametrically opposing Richard Dyers Star Theory.

The absurdity and randomness of the posts services

Postmodernism

Postmodern 

Found on 4chan 

Talk about marketing campaign 

Garfield animation that links back to social media page

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Mixed Media Animation Reel

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Final Film

★Final Film

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Final Social Media Page

★ Final Social Media Page

As Spacehey is a recreation of the original Myspace, it still follows Web 1.0 UI conventions of hyperlinks and page redirection. This makes my social media page rather hard to navigate and as such, I have created a small guide on how to navigate the website to ensure all my posts are viewed

How to navigate Spacehey

★ Remember to scroll down! The engagement is down at the bottom

★ Hit 'View Blog' to see posts and activity

★ When here, make sure to hit 'View Blog Entry' to see contents

★ Give the images a little while to load as the website is a fanmade project and thus not as fast as most social media pages

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Social Media Page Analysis

Due to the custom nature of Spacehey, I was able to make Vice's social media page highly tailored to their personal tastes and values. I wanted their page to reflect Vice's juvenile yet fun presentation

Spacehey allows for users to upload UI designs allowing for others to copy the source code for the UI to be used on other people's blogs. Though I experimented with other UI layouts that were characteristic of the 2000s such as WindowsXP and the iconic Myspace scenecore layout, I ultimately chose the 4chan UI design.

The choice to make my social media page 4chan was considered use of irony as to be intentionally provocative and agitative. With 4chan being highly associated with groups such as the alt right and white supremacists, it is possible the consequences of this joke would be the notion that Vice promotes the radical ideas 4chan is so controversial for. However, Vice's target audience of young to middle aged punks would understand the presented meta narrative, with the band's UI mocking 4chan and it's users as opposed to subliminally supporting it's ideas.

Whilst searching for interesting things to decorate my page with, I stumbled across a code to make your profile appear as a jewel CD case with a rotating CD. I found this to be a subtle way to communicate this webpage being for Vice as a band, as well as nicely present their upcoming album.

Throughout my blog, I wanted to make the sardonic personality of the brand shine, which was done through making the most of the available text boxes. Here, I wanted to demonstrate the band being genuine yet silly through sarcastic and post-ironic language.

Post irony is most clearly outlined in the the 'general' section, with the band claiming they are 'Making good memories and having fun :D'. This authenticity is masked with irony, but is, however, made apparent through the music video, in which we see Vice having fun in earnest during their production. The sarcasm is also present in the band claiming their book of choice to be 'Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One', as it's author, the controversial physicist Joe Dispenza is known for his cult-like meditation retreats. Finally, the choice of hero being Vladimir Lenin-McCartney of a similarly punk alternative-rock band 'TISM' presents Vice as inspired by bands with a similar outlook, as well as service questionable reactions due to TISM's obscurity.

I also got friends to engage with the social media account to demonstrate the kind of target audience Vice caters to, that being like minded punks. However, I wanted their engagement to outline the absurd, offbeat eccentricity Vice's fans also exhibit, pushing the likeness of the band and their followers.

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Social Media Content: Merchandise

In addition to featuring physical media and tour posters, the social media pages of both Beabadoobee and Death Grips feature merchandise. As such, I looked at both their full merchandise collections to gather both inspiration and an understanding of how artists utilise merchandise to strengthen their branding.

In a similar vein to the tour posters, the merchandise designs correspond to the album artwork, however with minute differences. Though very similar, the merchandise does offer an alternative perspective to the album artwork, such as The Money Store featuring the figures' full bodies and Beatopia featuring text at the bottom. This allows for variation yet cohesion in design, making the brand feel enriched and authentic.

Creation Process

Though I had two variant artworks to choose from, I had fully utilised both of them. As such, I decided to follow a similar route to Beabadoobee through adding text to the bottom. I chose to use the album name as opposed to the artist name to demonstrate my artist's stronger emphasis on music over identity. I did however, create a variant hoodie design which featured the artwork on the back of the CD.

Final Merchandise

Overall, I feel these designs are very strong and appealing whilst still feeling unique and cohesive.

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Social Media Content: Tour Poster

From analysing Death Grips and Beabadoobee's social media pages, I recognised they both included a custom graphic promotion an upcoming tour. Here, I realised the creation of a tour poster would be imperative to my artist's branding, and would service good promotion for the social media page.

I wanted to understand how the tour poster's graphics related to the artist's overall brand image, as well as what about them enables good promotion. I then analysed the individual posters of Beabadoobee and Death Grips' tours, and recognised the key information tour posters provide.

★ Date: Inclusive of year, season and day ★ Location: Inclusive of region, country and venue

I addition to this, I realised the posters reinforced the promotion of the new album through including aspects of branding that corresponded to new album, such as font, graphics and photography, in addition to having variant tour posters depending on the region.

Creation Process

Though not variant artwork or a photoshoot, I decided to use the drawings that were utilised on the back of my Digipak. This is due to the back artwork featuring both the album title and band name, which is imperative information for a tour poster. To present the actual information, I re used fonts from my Digipak, that being Anarchy and Futura Medium, which enabled cohesion between my tour poster and Digipak.

As analysed above, tour posters tend to have variants based off region, and thus kept my artist's our limited to the UK and EU, as well as summer months. As for deciding on venues, my artist, as a rising punk band, would likely stick to smaller, more intimate venues, such as pubs and live music venues. In my research, these small venues provided a platform for alternative music, as seen by pubs such as Hope and Anchor where at the height of the punk movement in 1977, hosted and recorded a live album which reached no.28 in the UK albums chart. As such, I reference Hope and Anchor in my poster.

Final Poster

Overall, I am very happy with how this album cover turned out. I feel the information is laid out very clear and clean, though still following punk convention through its crude simplicity, as well as the provocative joke at the bottom, marketing a show at the Vatican, the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, a place that would likely be opposed to the values my artist represents.

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Social Media Content: Magazine

Following Electronic artist's preference for analog media, I wanted Vice to feature in an underground, music based magazine. When choosing a magazine to interview Vice, I wanted to consider what genres of music the magazine covers as well as the interests of the average reader base, and whether or not they would be interest in Vice. I ultimately decided on using Snoozer magazine, an magazine with a focus on alternative music based out of Japan.

Though Snoozer is only published in Japan in Japanese, this does not prevent them from featuring both Japanese and Western artists such as the aforementioned Aphex Twin, Radiohead and Gorillaz. With punk being a popular subculture and music genre in Japan, I believe Vice could pose popular in Japan. In addition to this, Vice's eclectic nature presents them as very likely to accept a feature in an international magazine.

Graphical Process

I wanted to create promotional images for VIce's Snoozer feature, which entailed the creation of a cover and a couple of insert pages. I began my process in Adobe Illustrator, aiming to replicate the graphic design of Snoozer front covers. Though they have a couple of standard formulas, I chose to follow the one which utilised the sans serif typeface as the cover designs with it are often less cluttered, emphasising the artist.

I made sure to make the publishing time of the magazine correct, as well as feature other artists of a similar alternative genres who would be featuring in that months issue in order to make the product feel authentic.

When coming up with the graphics of my artist, I referenced a couple of their covers from the early 2000s and their graphical conventions. Many included photographs of the artist (though specifically the frontman if in a group), sans serif fonts and minimalist layouts.

I did three prototypes, one containing all three members of the group, another containing only two and the final one consisting only of the frontman. Though each mockup had their own strengths such as unique colour palettes, interesting composition and being overall legible, I decided the one I would utilise would be the one containing only two members. This is due to the candid imagery presenting Vice and genuine and authentic, as well as the aura of mystery generated through the missing member. Overall, I'm very pleased with the front cover as I feel it looks like a genuine Snoozer cover due to my replication of the graphics, as well as presents Vice's genuine brand perfectly.

For the contents, I again referenced the graphic design of the Aphex Twin feature, to my surprise, they featured juvenile drawings that align with Vice's branding. As such, I followed the general layout set by Snoozer however adjusted it to fit more with Vice such as replacing the drawings an album cover. Again, I tried my best to replicate Snoozer's font choice, which I believe I did very successfully.

Final magazine

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Digipack: Physical Media - Cassette and vinyl

With Vice primarily targeting young punks, the creation and selling of physical media would be imperative. This is not only due to the growing popularity of physical media, specifically cassette and vinyl, but also as it aids the band from relying solely on streaming platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify, which does not service the anti-establishment punk mentality. As such, the selling of physical media will serves as a stream of revenue for the band, and I wanted the designs to look as appealing as possible.

To maintain cohesion through my digipack, I re used the artworks made for the CD, however reworked them to suit the different formats and technicalities of cassette and vinyl.

Cassette

Inspirations

I again looked towards the digipack of Beabadoobee's 'Beatopia' for inspiration. Here, I wanted to understand how a square image was formatted to fit onto the rectangular cassette, as well as how information was laid out on the cassette itself, and ways it can correspond to the theme and overall feel of the product.

★ Beatopia

The designers for Beatopia opted to the crop the image to fit the margins of the cassette, a stylistic choice I wasn't particularly fond of, and thus needed to plan around as my original artworks were also created with the traditional square CD format. The font choice and graphic symbol of the butterfly were also maintained for the cassette, enabling cohesion throughout the Beatopia digipack, which is a sentiment I wanted to follow. I took note of the bold colour choices for the cassettes, specifically the use of colours that weren't majorly implemented in the album art such as olive and neon green, in addition to being fond of the far left indentation of detail.

Final

Following my analysis of the Beatopia cassette, my main takeaway was that I did not want my cassette artwork to be cropped. However, as I created my artworks with the square CD format in mind, I needed to either create new artwork entirely, or figure out a solution to make my illustrations fit on the cassette. I found a solution in combining the artwork from both the front and back covers, which did require the aid of photoshop. Despite this, as I used the same paper and the same drawing materials, the two illustrations blended together seamlessly, and only required minor compositional adjustments. This way, I avoided cropping and could have the illustrations suspended in white space, a look I find sleeker and more visually appealing.

For the cassette itself, I followed Beatopia's design philosophy of concentrating detail to one side, utilising my CD design for the cassette. However, I diverged from Beatopia by adding the songs that the side contained, to maintain balance throughout the piece. This also served a utilitarian purpose, enabling the consumer to know which songs are being listened to. Though I was fond of the bright colours the Beatopia cassettes offered, the juxtaposition between the comparatively muted colours of Beatopia and the boldness of the cassettes enabled a contrast that if replicated in my digipack, my already bright colours with a bright cassette would appear garish. As such, I took the opposite approach and made my cassette colours more pastel and muted, which perfectly balanced the product's aesthetics.

Vinyl

Inspirations

★ ...Baby One More Time

Though not a punk album, one of punk's core axioms is self expression and non-conformity. By not conforming to the traditional 'punk' design trends, and instead looking towards an album stemming from a highly oppositional genre, pop (or specifically bubblegum pop) my work still remains deeply rooted in the punk mentality. As such, I looked towards Britney Spears' ...Baby One More Time as inspiration for my record. I was fond of the pastel colours as well as the array of alternative vinyl designs, including but not limited to transparent records. The information layout of the central disc was also highly utilitarian, featuring the side, track list, copyright, and album and artist name. As such, I wanted to implement a similar layout on my final record.

Final

Again, I utilised a free .psd to create my record. I decided to keep the record cover the exact same as the CD cover, and thus it was eaisly included without change. I wanted to challenge myself to create a transparent vinyl mockup, which I achieved through lowering the opacity and using layer modes to adjust colours to create a pastel green. I followed the exact text and information layout on the ...Baby One More Time vinyl as I thought it was a highly efficient layout as well as being aesthetically pleasing, and thus come to a close on my physical digipack products.

Overall, I feel my physical media products are all highly successful in both aesthetics and displaying appropriate information. They, together, present as a cohesive pack and service presenting Vice as a modern punk band.

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Social Media Page - General Research and Planning

In creating a social media page, there were many factors that I needed to consider to ensure the page's accurate representation of Vice's beliefs and ideals. The process of creating the account needed consideration to how public figures traditionally create social media pages, and subverting them to fit Vice's punk non-conformist attitudes. As such, I looked towards an artist who's style has been a key influence on Vice, that being the indie pop artist Beabadoobee, as well as the social media pages of the hip-hop group Death Grips.

The factors I looked into that I deemed necessary to subvert were the following:

★ Platform ★ Handle / Username ★ Activity

Through the analysis and understanding of how these four key factors are traditionally utilised by celebrities, I can better demonstrate Vice as a counter culture, non conformist band through considered subversion.

Platform

Ideals

Vice, as a punk band, would be opposed to using mainstream, highly corporate social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter to avoid 'selling out'. As such, Vice would likely be drawn towards more niche, personalised and more personal blog-oriented spaces such as tumblr and wordpress due to the more personal and intimate nature of the band, prioritising more direct communication with target audiences.

Outcome

As such, the platform I decided to utilise for my social media page was spacehey, a fan made social network created as a homage to the now defunct myspace. This interplays with my music choice and music video aesthetic, containing characteristics of the 2000s.

Handle

Ideals

Many bands and public figures utilise easy to search usernames such as their name (e.g. @taylorswift) often by not always accompanied by 'thereal' or 'official' to serve their publicity and be accessible to a wide audience. This naming convention is highly corporate and spotlights the bands public image, as well as very subtly implies a vanity associated with fame.

As such, this naming practice is one Vice would be unlikely to follow, driving me to look towards what more naming conventions indie or punk adjacent artist's follow.

Exemplar Handles

Using the names @radvxz on instagram, generates an exclusivity to Beabadoobee and her music, as the lack of correlation with her stage name generates an aura of mystery and secrecy. However, Beabadoobee has stated that her decision to use the handle @radvxz 'doesn't mean anything' and was used because it 'just sounds cool'. This choice demonstrates her character as one that is unserious and fun, making decisions on a whim for aesthetic or personal choices, regardless of whether it benefits her brand image or not. This can also be applied to the chosen handle of Death Grips, that being @bbpoltergiest.

This is a similar philosophy I feel Vice would adhere to, leading me to settle on the handle @sidviceious

Selected Handle: @sidviceous

The handle @sidviceous is an intentional pun on the band name Vice and the bassist of the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious. Vicious became the renowned and infamous poster child of punk purely due to his 'punk' look, a notion many modern punks, and by virtue Vice, would disapprove of. As such, the handle makes Sid Vicious the butt of the joke, one which permeates throughout the page.

Activity

Ideals

Many celebrity social media pages often feature a balance of personal, progress and promotional posts. Personal posts provide insight into the character of the star, demonstrating how they too, live normal lives not too indifferent to the average person despite celebrity status. Progress posts are often the star providing a gli,pse into their creative process, an indicator of what is to come, which times into promotional posts, in which upon completion of the product, it is then promoted on the stars social media page.

In a similar vein to Death Grips, I wanted Vice's social media presence to be offbeat and eclectic, featuring a good balance of personal absurdity and promotion. Subversive to the average celebrity, Death Grips' ratio of personalised, progress and promotional posts is off, with their instagram page containing mostly absurd, personal posts that offer no insight into any of the members' lives. Despite this, there are still are posts dedicated to promoting tours and merchandise, and are strategically placed in succession.

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Digipack: CD - Second Draft

My first digipack paid homage to Raymond Pettibons comic-esque, monochromatic album covers. However, my attempts to replicate this style through the consolidation of poor line quality with a semi competent art style was incongruent, and resulted in the piece looking confused. I realised my attempts to reach a middle ground to make my art appear intentionally bad was not working, and thus needed to lean towards either end of the binary opposites of messy and clean. As such, I decided re-work my approach, and lean more towards the messy, more explicitly juvenile art direction.

Inspirations

★ Crest (Bladee, Ecco2k, 2022)

★ Beatopia (Beabadoobee, 2022)

★ Exeter (Bladee, 2020)

I then looked towards the artists from my original inspirational mood board. I recognised a trend in medium, using non-ink mediums that would often be seen in a kids classroom, such as both regular and coloured pencil, wax crayon and pastel. In addition to this, the use of wide, highly saturated colour palettes enables a childlike, jovial quality, a quality that is subverted by the pop-punk music the album represents.

In addition to this, the use of seemingly random, unrelated, and near surreal images as opposed to representing the artist is a very anti-commercial stance, one my original digipack did not adhere to as the sheer depiction of a band member has the most minor of implications of the band being identity driven, and by proxy utilising the self as a 'product', which goes against the punk mentality. As such, though in a wildly different direction to my original ideas, I decided to apply these qualities to my album artwork.

Criterion

★ Traditional, non ink mediums

★ Saturated colour palette

★ Random imagery (not including band members or logos)

Final Artwork

Front · Back

Following the above criterion, I produced these two artworks.

Though I wanted the imagery to appear random, the choices for each individual subject were strategic and were chosen in service to the punk mentality. The use of intertextual references, specifically Jim Davis' Garfield and Sanrio's Pompompurin, both child friendly IPs, in my artwork is not only characteristic of the punk 'cut and paste' culture, but also subverts their clean personas through inclusion on such a provocative album. I wanted to push being intentionally provocative through a bastardised depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, an image that may offend, but may be just as likely to service humour to others.

To add to the randomness, I utilised a bricolage of styles, drawing inspiration from 90s anime, comic strip absurdity, kids drawing and amateur art. I did however stray from my criterion, using a variety of mediums including pen ink and marker though I do feel the veering was beneficial to my overall piece, servicing the other criterion of saturated colours, which non ink based mediums fail to provide.

My choice to only use free, online fonts or simply handwriting also relates to the punk movement through being anti consumerist, refusing to subscribe to use premium fonts. As the piece was so messy and cluttered, I decided to use clean, sans serif fonts such as Public Sans and Futura. The choice to feature the album and band name on the back was strategic as after all, the album is still a product that requires selling. I did however want it to feel more personal and as such, hand wrote the band and album name. FInally, to make the album art feel like an actual product, I added a serial number, barcode and copyright.

Overall, I'm very happy with the outcome of these works, as I feel they effectively represent the band's brand image as well as the punk movement in both aesthetic and creation.

CD

For my previous digipack, I made a very simple CD design which only contained the album and band name in a scribbly font. Though the simplicity adhered to the anti establishment mentality, I wanted to make a new CD design to follow the new direction of my digipack. As such, I looked again towards my key inspiration of Beatopia, who's CD featured a scribbly butterfly. This reminded me and possibly drew inspiration from Britney Spears' '...Baby One More Time' CD, which consisted of a hand drawn flower.

With these inspirations in mind, I created this rather simple design of a cherub and scribble. I wanted the CD design to be comparatively simplistic to my album art as to contrast to its cluttered and random nature. As the details on the CD would be seen bigger than that of the album artwork, I used thicker lines with more bold mediums such as oil pastels. To also add texture to further juxtapose the alb um artwork, I crumpled the paper before scanning, servicing the handmade look.

To make the CD appear as a more coherent product, I included the compact disc logo as well as utilising free clipart to make a faux record label logo. I then used the same serial number and copyright that featured on the album art.

Consolidating ideas

I consolidated my ideas on this template, which enabled me to not only view how all aspects of my CD artwork interplayed with one another, but also map out a potential spine and inside insert design.

For the inside insert, I featured a polaroid from my film. However, my reasoning and choice of polaroid differ from that of my 1st digipack draft. This time, I decided on using a photograph that featured a couple of Vice's band members working on making the film. The subject of them actually creating the work, as well as the obscuring of their faces through either objects or life, undermines any connotations of 'selling out' through identity focus.

For the spine, I wanted something sleek and simple and thus decided on only including the album and band name around the middle of the spine. The simplicity paired with an intentionally poor font choice serviced the CD being identifiable, an aspect imperative to the punk mindset, being non conformist.

Final CD Digipack

Utilising a free .psd mockup set, I was able to see a proper visualisation of what the CD would look like in real life. Overall, I am very pleased with this CD design, as i feel all the designs are perfectly balanced with colour, type and negative space. Throughout the entirety of the creative and tangible creating process, I adhered to the punk axioms of anti-establishment, anti-communist, non-conformity and DIY ethic, which by proxy, makes my album approachable to my target audience of young, likeminded punks.

[jihanesroom]

Digipack: CD - First Draft

For the first draft of my digipack, I analysed the works of Raymond Pettibon and drew from their handmade, juvenile quality as inspiration. As Pettibon often depicts humans as subjects in his album covers, I decided to look through screencaps of my film to find potential references for the album cover. The first sections of my music video I thought to look to were the polaroid sections as they were already still images.

Though not square, I decided to use the landscape polaroid. This is due to the polaroid containing more than one subject as per Raymond Pettibon, but also due to it containing Vice's frontman and the mystery girl from the music video. This generates an aura of mystery surrounding who she is, causing an intrigue which encourages purchase.

Knowing I would be copying the image directly, I wanted to explore alternative types of composition. I brainstormed various ways of framing the image, from filling up the cover entirely to retaining the polaroid format. I looked towards 'The Money Store' (Death Grips, 2012) and 'Goo' again, to understand the importance of contrast and colour balance. I was fond of the vertical split between black and white in 'The Money Store' cover and sought to emulate it in the final cover.

Without doing a base sketch, I directly drew with a thick black marker on the paper. This way, I got more lose, flowing and honest linework. I adhered to using simple mediums such as a random black marker and computer paper as to display the impurities in quality and thus, present as more juvenile and intentionally bad. I then scanned the art to produce my album cover as scanners really capture the gritty textures of paper, adding to the 'DIY' aesthetic.

Final Product

Cover

Digipack

I decided to present my digipack through a prototype package. I downloaded a free .psd file and began laying out my work. This layout gave me additional option of adding the inner contents of the CD booklet, of which I input the polaroids that turn up in my music video, albeit for spit seconds, as to serve trans media convergence and give my audience a glimpse of aspects of the music video they may have wanted to appreciate more. I also got to work on the CD design, of which I also kept exceedingly, and perhaps deceivingly, simple considering the contents of my music video being that of a visual college, a juxtaposition I thought would be interesting.

A pro of this cover is that it fit the criterion of looking like a handmade, juvenile product. However, there is an equilibrium that must be met with irony, and I felt the marker lines looked a little too juvenile and the text placement was not optimal nor readable. Upon analysis of the other covers, I realised that though the linework was shaky and not precise, all colours were solid which was the defining factor in what separates ironic and un-ironic 'bad' artwork. As such, I thought to redo my digipack with this new knowledge, and combat these issues perhaps by using the image trace feature on Adobe Illustrator for clean lines.

[jihanesroom]

Random Album Cover Task

To begin the graphical process of creating a digipack, we were tasked with creating an album cover based of a series of random prompts. These prompts involved using both a randomly generated image and text to create a cohesive album cover through strategic font choice and placement.

Selected Image:

Selected Artist Name: Kevin Ash

Selected Quote: He's a plastic surgeon

Though my image and quote did fit each other, as my image was a very simple portrait of a woman, it was difficult to discern what genre-specific conventions of an album cover I could utilise. As such, I looked to other covers with intentionally vague or unconventional design. One of which being Nevermind (Nirvana, 1991)

Despite being a rock album, the image choice of a baby fishing for money doesn't explicitly conjure association with the rock genre. As such, I took direct inspiration from the font choice and and side placement of the type. I decided to directly re-create the process used to create the iconic 'Nevermind' font. The font was originally ITC Franklin Gothic, before then being run through a scanner to create the warped effect.

In ITC Franklin Gothic, I printed out 'HES A PLASTIC SURGEON' and ran it through a scanner multiple times to get a range of wavy warps. I then copied the scans onto Adobe Illustrator and used the image trace function to create clean vectors of the new font. I then copied them onto photoshop to place next onto the image.

I thought to again, directly reference the placement of 'Nevermind' however thought placement over the woman's face would both look more visually appealing however also demonstrate an aura of mystery adding to the lack of clarity on the genre the album would be.

Final

My theory that my cover would fail to be genre specific was proven true with the response to my album cover:

Genres included house, indie, pop and experimental pop. Though this was a difficult challenge considering the rather inspiring image, it was a useful exercise and relates to the idea of ambiguity I want my digipack artwork to employ.

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Digipack Planning

After compiling my inspirations, I looked towards the intricacies of their designs to discern what aesthetic choices I would follow. The main album I used for design inspiration would be Goo (Sonic Youth, 1990) and Twin Fantasy (Car Seat Headrest, 2018). Both these album designs can be summarised in their simplicity, monochrome palette and handmade, authentic style.

Goo - Sonic Youth

Designed by punk artist Raymond Pettibon, 'Goo' pulls from his characteristic use of icons from popular culture. The illustration is an interpretation of a photograph of Maureen Hindley and David Smith, witnesses to the Moors Murders. This image paired with the text is intentionally provocative to those aware, however is niche enough to fly over the heads of many. There is a distinct crudeness to the both the illustration and typography, with messy, unrefined line work and unmapped type layouts, suggesting the image was created straight on the paper without prior planning. Pettibon made the image on computer paper with black ink, which may me a medium I utilise in the creation of my digipak.

Twin Fantasy - Car Seat Headrest

The album art work for 'Twin Fantasy' is sleek and simplistic, depicting two intertwining dogs. The illustration is actually a piece of concept artwork, intended to serve as a basis for a commission for the proper album artwork. However, the drawings simplicity was viewed as charming by the artist, and posited to the band to keep the drawing. Like 'Goo', it was created with ink on paper.

As such, I decided to look more into Raymond Pettibon's work with other artist's album covers.

Cracks In The Sidewalk - Various artists, 1980

Six Pack - Black Flag (1981)

Both are more refined than Pettibon's work on 'Goo', with cleaner and more detailed line work as well as featuring vector fonts. Looking into his other work gave me a wider breath of visual stimulation and more ideas as to how to go about making my digipack.