OUGD 603 - Brief 4, Secret 7

Brief

"Secret 7” takes 7 tracks from 7 of the best-known musicians around and presses each one 100 times to 7” vinyl. We then invite creatives from around the world to interpret the tracks in their own style for every 7”. 700 sleeves are exhibited and then sold for £50 apiece. You don’t know who created the sleeve, or even which song it’s for, until you have parted with your cash - the secret lies within."

Secret 7 Website

This will be my third year of doing secret 7. It is a fun brief that allows a lot of creative freedom. Hoping to spend no more than two weeks on this project. Last year I only submitted one sleeve, and this year would like to try and submit more. I am aiming to do 4 sleeves. Also, I want the different sleeve that I create to all go together as a set, I can achieve this by using similar styles and colour schemes.

Last Years Submission

Last year my Secret 7 submission was one of the ones that was selected and shown at Somerset House. Because of this, I tried to keep into consideration why my design got selected. I also looked at the entire selection that was picked last year and found that there was a lot of illustration and handmade based designed. This year I did want to create something different, but still used the illustrativee style in one of the sleeves.  

Research

The songs:

1. The Jam - Art School

The song talks about having the freedom to do anything that you want to.

'Anything that you wanna do, anyplace that you wanna go. Don't need permission for everything that you want'

The Jam were an English punk rock/mod revival band active during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Tame Impala - The Less I Know the Better

Tame Impala s an Australian psychedelic rock band.

The clip is a strange tale of high school lust and jealousy (and King Kong) played out in a technicolor trip.

Chvrches - Clearest Blue

Chvrches  are a Scottish synthpop band from Glasgow.

"Light is all over us"

Max Richter - Dream 3

Dream 3 is an offshoot of Richter’s durational album Sleep, which clocks in at 8 hours – about the amount of sleeping time scientists recommend for adults. While Sleep is intended as “a personal lullaby for a frenetic world” and meant to be listened while one is counting sheep and through the duration of the sleep cycle, From Sleep is a more modest 60-minute ambient daydream. It’s a warm blanket of hazy, cozy sound. Richter calls it his “manifesto for a slower pace of existence.” The two albums share a common landscape, but with a much shorter run-time From Sleep is less of a political statement.
Max Richter taking about this track "The architecture of the eight-hour piece hangs on the concept of variations. The Dream variations are the central string that holds it all together and it’s the music that started the whole project off --- me and the piano alone in the studio at night ruminating on all the reading I have been doing on neuroscience. It’s pulsing piano-centred material. I wanted it to be deliberately very simple music but something that played with the idea of time – so I used a set of descending chords structured in a way that an 18th century musician would recognise, but broken up, and contextualised via electronics and subsonic bass in a way that could only happen now."

Album cover research:

I looked at some of my albums for inspiration, there were my favourite designs:

Arcade Fire

The Strokes

Metronomy

Alt-J

Clean Bandit

Devendra Banhart

The Jam - Art School

Inspiration: Ever since Dr Me came into uni I have become very interested in working with colleges. So decides this would be the perfect opportunity to create one.

Design:

The concept behind the piece is was an art school, I wanted to just do what I wanted to do, do anything and be creative. With it being art school based I decided to combine the two design sides; digital and hand to create a combination of the two through a collage piece. I drew out the scene using pointillism, they layered it together with the original image. The illustration took is drawn to scale (7x7inch)  and took 8hrs to complete.

 Tame Impala - The Less I Know the Better

Inspiration: Photo manipulation and a modern psychedelic feel. Tame Impala have some of the best album artwork, so I look at their existing albums for inspiration.

Design:

I experimented with different way of distorting the image. Photo manipulation is used throughout Tame Impala, but it can also be relevant in relation to  the title of the track 'the less I know the better.' Creating something that is unclear and unknown.

I wanted to create an image with lots going on. I started with a simple image of a plant, but though distorting the image and overlaying things over it, it becomes less clear that it was an image of a plant to begin with. In reference to the title 'the less I know the better', I have created something that is unclear and hidden. As well as something that is a similar style to Tame Implala's existing album artwork.

Max Richter - Dream 3

Inspiration: I researched into images that had a dreamlike vibe abut them.

Design:

Becuase the song is meant to be listened to during a sleep cycle, in my design, I wanted to create a dazed vibe. I think that the colours do well at creating this calm sleep like feeling. In addition, Max Richter says how "The architecture of the eight-hour piece hangs on the concept of variations." When he mentioned architecture it gave me the idea to experiment with an image of a building.

Richter also states how he "I used a set of descending chords structured in a way that an 18th-century musician would recognise, but broken up" This was my inspiration for splitting up the image, creating a descending effect. I used a lot of white space to white space to give it a simplistic dreamlike feel.

  Chvrches - Clearest blue

Inspiration: Geometric minimal photograhy

Design:

The photo I took while I was in Notting Hill in October. I rotated the image around and played around with the angles in the photo. I added the lines to try and represent the rays of a sun, this is because the first lyric of the song is "light is all over is" . The image also has clear blue skies in reference to the title.

Mock Up