OUGD503 - Studio Brief 1: Competition Brief 5: Secret 7"

For a fifth small competition brief I have decided to do this years Secret 7". When I finished it last year I didn't think I'd done a very good job at all as it was something completely out of my comfort zone. Another issue I found with last years competition was that I didn't like any of the songs that were there really, however this year there are a couple of songs that I do like, and as this isn't on a time restraint like it was last year, I feel a lot more relaxed and positive about fulfilling this brief. Something I liked about the way this brief was done last year was making 5 variations of what this could be. Last year this gave me a lot  to work with, so I will be going by this again so I have a lot of choice.

The song I have chosen is 'Strange Creatures' by Jake Bugg.

Link to song

Secret 7 Rules

1. Your design must not include the artist’s name or the song title - it’s a secret after all.
2. Concentrate your design on what will be the front, only this will be visible on our exhibition walls
3. Dimensions should be 182mm x 182mm, with a 3mm bleed. That’s 188mm x 188mm in total. The bleed won’t be visible, so bear that in mind
4. Your file must be produced in CMYK so it’s setup to be printed.
5. Any PMS specials will be converted. Metallic or fluorescent inks cannot be reproduced.
6. Your file must be 300dpi
7. Your file must be saved as either a Tiff, JPEG, EPS or PDF
8. Do try and reduce the size of your file as much as possible
9. You can submit a sleeve design for as many of our tracks as you like
10. You must upload designs by the 17th February 2014
11. If we email you with the good news that you’ve made it into the show please keep it a secret. It makes for a much better project! We are asking for your name, website and twitter handle when you submit a design so we can shout about all our designers once Record Store Day has passed and the secrets are out.
12. All of the submissions will be reviewed by Secret 7’’, Universal Music, Mother London & It’s Nice That. Where possible we involve the musicians in that process too.
13. We will contact everyone to tell them whether or not they’ve made it into the show.

The first thing I did was listen through the track, as well as the rest of the music by Jake Bugg to get a overall sense of what kind of artist he is. I am already familiar with his music so this wasn't such a hard task.

To start this off I thought about associations to his music.
Associations:

• Acoustic
• Guitar
• Organic
• Young
• Singer/Songwriter
• Old style - no over-autotuned songs
• Authentic
• Not too serious - quite playful lyrics & melodies

The main idea I had was to incorporate an acoustic guitar and vinyl disc together to create a simple design.

A separate idea I had was for it to be quite contemporary and be flat vector design with a few colours together. This could also incorporate the guitar and vinyl.

I drew out a few ideas to try out.

Initial Ideas

From here I went to Illustrator and started mocking these up, expanding on these initial ideas to come up with a large variety of variations.

I started with just the guitar shape and a coloured background. I decided on going for an orange as the main colour. The music is quite authentic, which implies a rustic colour like brown, however as he is a young artist I wanted to keep it contemporary and eye catching.

 Although I like these and think they work well, they don't necessarily become memorable in any way, and without the artist name and song name, these need to be memorable. If these were included, I think this design could work well.

I then moved onto using the guitar and vinyl disk together, keeping it as a flat design like above.

These are more promising as there is more to the composition even though it is still simple. However I think they may be too simple. To make it more clear that it is a vinyl record, I added concentric circles.

 These look a bit more promising than the ones above as they are a lot more clear as to what the design is.
I then decided to experiment with the idea of just using the guitar.

This is taken from the initial drawings I did, and I don't like how it turned out at all. It just doesn't look right or represent the song very well.
After the failure of that idea I decided to try creating a pattern with the guitar and see how that could work. This is also a point where I can use a colour combination instead of just orange and white/black.
I went on adobe kuler and played around with the wheel until a found a colour scheme I was happy with. I then took this into Illustrator and changed the tones/colour mixes until they were at something I was pleased with.
I then created a couple of potential patterns.

This is the first. I think it is effective, but perhaps too simple, so have decided to further this and include guitars going horizontal too.

This pattern works much better, and works well with the colour scheme too. I then decided to try incorporate this with the vinyl.

This is definitely a possibility to take further.
I started on the next idea I had which was to expand the second idea shown above. This was to make the image a bit more interesting to look at overall.

I think these work well however I will have to experiment further with the colours used for the middle of the vinyl. It is much more interesting than the previous attempt at this, but I am a little hesitant in whether it is better or not. Just because it's more interesting to look at doesn't necessarily mean its better.

After working in vector images for the whole time, I decided to look into the potential of using photographic images instead of vector images, or a combination of the two.
I wanted to do this through using the pattern created above and clipping the images down to fit in each shape so it would be like a photomontage.
I looked into using images that could be associated to his style of music and completed this process.

Initial thoughts are that this design has potential. On it's own it doesn't work as a final image, but I think with the use of vector images over the top/incorporated I can get it to work well.

Using the vector images in this way on top doesn't work particularly well. I think this is down to the random nature of the shapes. If these were arranged in a geometric/systematic way it might work better with the circle. The use of filters is interesting to me and I think this is the way I want to move forward with this design.
After doing the design this way, I flipped it round so the design went in the circle instead of outside it.

These work much better than the designs before. It seems much more focussed and much better visually.

After completing all these variations I decided that it would be best to get some kind of feedback on which design to move forward with.
I got a mixed reaction, with people either choosing the second design or this last design to move forward with. One piece of feedback was that they liked the ones with the guitar over the vinyl like it was the needle of the record player. This wasn't the intended concept behind it, however it was a good point and gave me something that I could definitely think about using.
What I have found the hardest with this brief is that it is obviously supposed to be secret who the track is designed for, so there is no inclusion of the names. I do think these would enhance the current designs to the point where they could be submitted.
So at this point I need to be able to create a design which doesn't need to rely on text at all.

After a lot of consideration I decided that I would move forward with the idea of the record player. Visually this technology is very recognisable and would be quite easy to duplicate in a vector format. The main idea is that the majority of it would be vector images but I would use the photographic image is the middle circle of the disc where the titles are always written.
This would also give me a chance to be able  to play around with the tools in illustrator and try work on my image making skills. I didn't want it to be a completely flat design, so this is the challenge I have set myself to make it visually layered and appealing to look at.
Once I got all the base images created I added gradient outlines to create a bit of a drop shadow and give these items height. This seemed to work quite well and the design looks a lot better. I did five variations of this design.

My initial thoughts are that the first and last designs are the strongest. The guitar doesn't quite fit in with where it is placed in the other three, and although I did want to use it in the design, it shouldn't be used for the sake of using it.

I am quite pleased with where I am at with the design at the minute, but there is room for improvement. The first thing I need to change is the photographic circle in the middle. At the size it was in previous designs it works well, however at this size there is too much going on in a much too small place.

Another thing I want to change is that there isn't particularly a lot of character to the record player. As it is an album cover and not reality, it doesn't necessarily have to be true to function, and could be a lot more creative. This is something I would like to continue to develop on.

I changed the image quickly and decided it worked much better as just a single image, however I am not sure about the cropping of the image so will work further on this. I also added guitar outlines to the buttons & needle in the start of my attempt to give the design a bit more character.

I tried to make it a bit more exciting so changed the brown to red, and tried out a few variations.

I'm not sure if these are better or not. My initial thoughts are that these are bolder and a little more eye catching but it does go away from the rustic, old style I was going for initially. However because Jake Bugg is young and contemporary that could be a reason for having it in the red. I am also still not sure about using guitars in the middle or a photographic image.

After leaving this for a few days I decided to go back to it and had a bit of feedback from peers about which they preferred. They all preferred the record player with the brown background, however I was still not completely convinced about the overall look of it. I still don't think it looks right and best reflects the song.

I referred back to one of my initial ideas of perhaps having it as a more realistic looking design than vectorised. I then mocked up a potential idea and developed it.

I tried incorporating a few of the lines from the song.

I then took it into Illustrator and mocked up up with a boarder.

At first I was quite positive about how this was going, however looking at it now, I'm not too sure about it and think it doesn't look as professional and clean as the idea before. However I do like the idea of the boarder around the artwork.
I decided that I needed a couple more of the previous designs in this format so I could compare and decide on a final design.

 I really like the way this design looks, especially the first one. It's quite understated but works well, especially without the record player added to it.

 This seems ok, but like the first time I used it, it does still seem a little bare and not really thought about. It would look much better if I could include typography to it, but as just an image, it doesn't work that well.

I then decided to design another idea that I had initially and hadn't done yet. I initially wanted to take a close up photograph of the front of a guitar, but as I didn't have one at hand, and liked the way the vector images worked, I decided to create it in Illustrator.

 I think this definitely works much better than the photographic attempt I had previously, and is definitely a possibility for the final design. At the minute I would say it's between these two designs below.

They're both very simple designs, but very different. I do think I like the first one a lot more, but in terms of representing the song, the second one definitely does that more. It is this reason why I have chosen that this is the design.

I want to make a couple of changes to it first though. As there is a bleed, having the pattern around the edge is a bit risky because potentially it could be printed a little bit off and not look right, so I want to take this away. It will also make it more realistic as a guitar front I think. I also want to round the edges a bit more on the darker piece of wood holding the strings in place. The rest of the design is quite rounded and it is quite severe in the tips. I also might consider making it a bit smaller too.

Final Design:

As a whole, I think I have probably spent a bit too much time on this project and got a bit too annoyed at it. It is only a small brief so shouldn't have taken up the amount of time that it did. However I do think I have developed it well and have developed my design skills in the fact that I had to use a lot to get to the final point of the brief. I used a few tools and experimented with ideas that I haven't done before, so this has been a bit of a learning curve. Overall I al quite pleased with this outcome. Last years design was a bit of a disaster as I was using Illustrator as a rookie, but I think this brief this year has shown me how far I have come since then. I might have spent a lot of time on this brief, but as I can now design very quickly using Illustrator, I haven't wasted too much time on it and have got outcomes very quickly.

Submitting the design: