#albumbrief

[yasminmwong]

ALBUM COVER//CONEPT DEVELOPMENT AND REFINEMENT

Refining my concept began with choosing the thumbnail I most wanted to emulate. I like this one was it really was at the forefront of my mind when I listened to the music.

I then decided to try and create the image physically. I worked with felt and shaving foam to try and get the textures I wanted to get some depth in the image.

I was happy with what I had created but felt the backdrop was quite flat and dull compared to the sides, it wasn’t one whole complete picture. I tried to digitally add on some texture from previous experiments. 

After than I played with colour and composition, I kept it quite wide and open to keep that empty and felt that purpley blue tones worked really well.

And voila!

[harrietjulia]

BRIEF/ Music Response : Album Cover Imagery The Research Stage

Our first big brief is to design an Album cover responding to a song. First point of call is to research Album Artwork and Graphic Designers that inspire and interest us. I have been collating a large folder of album artwork that I feel I immediately respond to. The first one I wanted to learn more about just so happens to be the very well known Scottish band, Biffy Clyro and the cover artwork designs of Thomas Robson. 

References

Thomas-r.com. (2017). Thomas Robson, Artist. [online] Available at: http://thomas-r.com [Accessed 10 Oct. 2020]

Trendell, A. (2020). Biffy Clyro – ‘A Celebration Of Endings’ album review. [online] NME Music News, Reviews, Videos, Galleries, Tickets and Blogs | NME.COM. Available at: https://www.nme.com/reviews/album/biffy-clyro-a-celebration-of-endings-album-review-2725267 [Accessed 10 Oct. 2020].

[yasminmwong]

ALBUM COVER//CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT AND REFINEMENT

This was a more scaled back imagery as I felt representing isolation in space could be done either very obviously or very abstractly. I wanted to keep things minimal but powerful and impactful. I tried adding layer however it worked best just stripped.

I kept the centre of the circle slightly to the side as I felt it drew your eye to it more than in the middle, and was a little but unnerving, as you would be all alone in space.

As a theme throughout this, I felt blue and purple were the colours that best went along with the music. I think using these and working with the contrast created something visually quite stand out. 

[yasminmwong]

ALBUM COVER//SKETCHBOOK PROCESS AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

My process began by listening to my chosen song: Laika by Biosphere.

I was drawn to the song because of the title - Laika -the first dog sent to space, and the first animal to orbit the earth.

The Artist:

Biosphere is a Norwegian electronic musician who is well known for making ambient music, and quite often uses sounds and samples from real life and from science fiction. Hi 1997 album Substrata, which this song was a bonus track on, was voted as the best all-time classic ambient album.

The Song: 

I loved the song, and listening to it made me feel like I was floating through space. I started to write down everything I felt when it was on (and as a 14 minute song, I had plenty of time to write). I thought in my head not only how did the song make me feel, and how did I picture it, but also about how it related to its namesake. How Laika would have felt in her journey into space.

The song features dreamy tones with melodic trills that swell up with the music, with layers adding on top of synthesised notes. There’s also snippets of audio from a documentary about Mir, the space station operated by the Soviet Union and later Russia. The song goes through peaks and troughs, building cresendos falling to smooth, low hums. It really makes you feel as though you are on this journey through space. Listening through, the main things I experienced were: Peace and relaxation, Isolation, Connection, Excitement and Anticipation. I decided I would try and explore these feelings and try and communicate them through the album artwork. 

Visualising the feelings

After I created my mind map - I decided to created a visual board of previous work I had done, that reflected the emotions and thoughts I experienced from the music. I sifted through work I had done for previous dot, line, shape work and also looked through my photos on my phone, and any doodles I had done while listening. 

This helped me translate what I had in my mind onto paper, what the emotions looked like to me, and help me get a starting point for what the look of my covers would be. 

From here I had idea of the visuals I wanted to dive further into.

Now What?

Many of the concepts intertwined with one another, and I wanted to keep the imagery relatively abstract, so that more than one part of the song could speak at any one time when you looked at the album cover.

[yasminmwong]

ALBUM COVER//EXPERIMENTS//LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

I really wanted to explore light and light photography - because there’s lots of things you can do with light and the effects almost always turn out beautiful.

I had a lot of fun trying to make different shapes and patterns with the long exposure as well as taking photos of some lights to try and creating some sharp and contrasting images.

Taking a look at my themes: Floating in Space, Isolation, Communication and Connection and New Worlds.. there was a lot of ways light filtered into these.

Light for example is a big feature of space. It’s what allows us to see the stars at night, and has helped us in so many ways to identify new worlds. It also well represents technology and how we have used it to communicate and build new ways to explore.

Experimenting was useful to figure out the specifics of how light can be used to symbolise these different parts of the song. 

For example, the glow sticks were useful in creating patterns and depth. Moving the camera about to create tunnel like images that connected well to the isolation and the travelling aspects of the music. The way the images presented in these bright lines was also closely representative of waves again. Some of the pictures such as the three glowstick rings in the water, and the bundle of fairy lights gave a kind of alien life vibe. I wanted this to be implied rather than presented obviously, so I kept that in mind.

Some of the images was quite nice because it felt very futuristic. Like I was creating an image from tron. I quite liked the idea of using this to represent the exploration of new worlds, as a lot of the images in my mood board had neon elements. 

This has certainly gave me a lot of material and ideas to develop my initial concepts and thumbnails with.

[yasminmwong]

ALBUM COVER//RESEARCH//3

Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood (also known as Dan Rickwood) is best known for creating the album artwork for Radiohead. His work is probably most interesting to me because of the ever evolving style and techniques he uses to capture the imagery that works best with the album’s sound. 

For OK computer, Donwood created the imagery using a computer with a tablet and light pen - and had a rule that nothing would be erased! For hail to the Thief, Donwood was inspired by the repetitive words and colours that he had seen over and over again on signs and advertisements in people’s front gardens. He wrote all the words down, cut them up, and combined them to show a road map of Hollywood (where the album was recorded) (Jones, 2013).

I also feel very drawn to the visual work has done for Thom Yorke’s solo albums. The Eraser album cover, was actually just a small section of a 13-foot linocut. The image - named ‘London Views’ was inspired by the 2004 floods in Cornwall, and the Indian ocean Tsunami, and shows a London flooded and destroyed (Meacher, n.d.). The art aptly fits the music music of the album, as there is a central theme of the impending devastating impacts of global warming. 

Donwood’s work not only gives visual and technical inspiration, but also conceptual too. 

References:

Williams, E. 2017. Stanley Donwood and the tempest. Creative Review. Accessed 26 October 2020. Available at:  https://www.creativereview.co.uk/stanley-donwood-radiohead/?nocache=true&adfesuccess=1

Gosling, E. 2020. Stanley Donwood Reveals What it’s Really Like Working With Radiohead for 25 Years. Elephant. Accessed 26 October 2020. Available at: https://elephant.art/stanley-donwood-whats-really-like-working-radiohead-decades-25032020/

Hunt, E. 2016. INSIDE THE ARTWORK: RADIOHEAD ART COLLABORATOR STANLEY DONWOOD TALKS ‘IN RAINBOWS’ AND LP9. DIYMAG. Accessed 26 October 2020. Available at: https://diymag.com/2016/03/22/radiohead-in-rainbows-new-album-lp9-stanley-donwood-interview

Dombal, R. 2010. Radiohead Artist Stanley Donwood. Pitchfork. Accessed 26 October 2020. Available at: https://pitchfork.com/features/take-cover/8640-take-cover-radiohead-artist-stanley-donwood/

Jones, L. 2013. Stanley Donwood On The Stories Behind His Radiohead Album Covers. NME. Accessed 28 October 2020. Available at: https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/stanley-donwood-on-the-stories-behind-his-radiohead-album-covers-766325

Meacher, C. n.d. Got It Covered. Latest Art. Accessed 28 October 2020. Available at: https://latest-art.co.uk/features/?id=4

Album Art Featured

From top to bottom

Radiohead - ‘In Rainbows’ (2007) Self Released, XL Recordings and TBD Records.

Radiohead - ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ (2016) XL Recordings

Atoms for Peace - ‘Amok’ (2013) XL Recordings

Radiohead - ‘OK Computer’ (1997) Parlophone and Capitol Records

Radiohead - ‘Hail to the Thief’ (2003) Parlophone and Capitol Records

Thom Yorke - ‘The Eraser’ (2006) XL Recordings