Project Rational
Secret 7 is a yearly competition/exhibition where designers everywhere can submit 7" album cover designs for a select list of songs. Designers can rationalise their designs in anyway, it can be take from the lyrics, the artist, the theme of the track, or just something that makes them think of the song- it's a very open brief. The only requirement is to not have the name of the song or artist on the cover (this is the secret part), this way when being sold at the exhibition buyers will purchase a record because of it's design and not because of the song, or because a famous designer produced it.
I immediately knew I wanted to do secret 7" this year as part of my responsive module so the day the artists were announced I went straight to the webpage and listened to all the songs.
Secret 7 is a yearly competition/exhibition where designers everywhere can submit 7" album cover designs for a select list of songs. Designers can rationalise their designs in anyway, it can be take from the lyrics, the artist, the theme of the track, or just something that makes them think of the song- it's a very open brief. The only requirement is to not have the name of the song or artist on the cover (this is the secret part), this way when being sold at the exhibition buyers will purchase a record because of it's design and not because of the song, or because a famous designer produced it.
I immediately knew I wanted to do secret 7" this year as part of my responsive module so the day the artists were announced I went straight to the webpage and listened to all the songs.
The track that stood out most to me was Born Slippy by Underworld. After listening to all the tracks on offer it was the one that conjured the best visual ideas. I purposefully chose not to look at artwork already existing for the song or the band as I felt this would dictate the style too much and it wouldn't be my own style that produced it. I also felt existing work would be something a lot of people would try to produce images in the style of and so be an overly common style of submission.
There was one visual idea that I liked the most and it was an image of a boy pulling his chest open and looking at his exposed ribcage and heart inside so I made a quick sketch (and when I say quick, I mean quick, 15 mins tops) of it and scanned it in to be digitised.
There was one visual idea that I liked the most and it was an image of a boy pulling his chest open and looking at his exposed ribcage and heart inside so I made a quick sketch (and when I say quick, I mean quick, 15 mins tops) of it and scanned it in to be digitised.
I had decided that I wanted to produce the piece in a more vectorised style than my normal illustrations and so using the pen tool in Illustrator I created shapes for each of the elements (skin, hair, jacket etc) in order to get that 2D look.
I struggled to decide whether I liked the illustration and figured I'd wait and see what it felt like with a background, however, choosing a 'trippy' enough background just made me loathe the whole idea more.
No matter how many different versions I produced I just didn't like it, and to be honest the vector style I had set out to used just wasn't sitting right with me. I've always worked well with dark outlines and have to accept that's the way my illustrations look best and so I decided to go back to the sketch book and produce a more detailed version of the design.
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