For this brief I chose to design artwork for Haim, an all girl band from California who have been likened to bands such as fleetwood mac.
I wanted to create a piece that showed the sound of the band but also show their influences and give people an idea of what kind of record they will be buying, as the point of the secret 7 is that the buyer doesn't know what song or artist they're buying until the open and listen to what they've bought.
Looking at record sleeves from fleetwood mac and the modern day I found quite a lot of interesting things.
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| The Fleetwood mac record sleeves are mainly picture based with only a small amount of text and so this is what I started looking at in modern day record sleeves. |
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| I think that the colours on this sleeve work really well and the imagery is simple, but girly. |
As the competition states that the name of the artist or song cannot be shown on the record sleeve I like the idea of using image and pattern to make the cover look interesting and slightly girly, perhaps using images of flowers or typically girly colours.
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| I like how this uses more than one image to tell a story within the illustrations, and the use of repeated pattern. |
I also like the idea of using pattern or lines on the sleeve. As the music of Haim has a lot of 80's and 90's influences in it i think it would work really well to illustrate that.
The repeated/mirrored pattern on this sleeve is really interesting and I really like that the colours are not realistic of the flowers.
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| Initial design ideas. I like the idea of using repeated pattern and a mix of shapes. |
Using pictures of Orchids I already had from a previous project, I cut out and repeated the image four times to create this interesting looking image. I then changed the colours to make them look less like real life flowers and more like an interesting pattern.
I wanted to create a pattern as well to go behind this image, or even be a sleeve on its own. I tried out a few of my designs to see how they would all look together with the orchid image.
Using diagonal lines in small boxes within the boundaries of the sleeve I created this pattern which I really like. I think it works well to show some of the influences and edgy tones of the music, but perhaps is slightly too busy, and so by reducing the number of smaller boxes within the sleeve it looks much better. Adding colour to these diagonal boxes makes the pattern look great when the orchid photo isn't introduced into the record sleeve, but when the photo element is introduced it looks much too busy for the type of music that Haim create and doesn't suit it at all.
I then went on to create a more simple pattern using just boxes inside of each other with works well to show the type of music I am trying to represent. With this pattern it was much easier to use colour and worked really well with the orchid photos.
Although I think that the colour in the background on the pattern works well, i think the sleeve is more striking with a white background and black boxes. I think that the colour, especially a pink or purple makes the sleeve too girly looking and doesn't have the same edge that the music has.
For my final piece I rotated the orchid pictures 90 degrees to obscure them even more.
I am overall happy with the piece that i have submitted. I think that the piece shows what the band and the music is about without giving too much away about what single the buyer will be purchasing, still leaving that little bit of secrecy.
