OUGD406 Studio Brief 1 - Professional Practice Secret 7"

Studio Brief 01 - Design is About Doing

Module ID:	OUGD406	Module Brief:	Click Here
Module Leader:	Simon Harrison	Module Deadline:	01/05/15 (13:00)
Brief Deadline:	02/02/15 (09:30)	Outcomes Assessed:	4A7, 4B6, 4C8, 4C9, 4D6

Studio Brief

LIVE BRIEF: SECRET 7” http://secret-7.com/ Design a 7" record sleeve for one of the following 7 artists: The Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be The Supremes - Reflections The Maccabees - Go Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer The Rolling Stones - Dead Flowers St. Vincent - Digital Witness Underworld - Born Slippy You should aim to visually explore the artists and tracks, through the context of the secret 7 competition. You are competing against 1000's of submission from all over the world, how can your design/designs stand out. What are the obvious responses? How can knowledge of these inform your own visual investigation. 100 designs for each track will be selected, pressed and printed to be exhibited and sold for £50 to raise money for the Nordoff Robbins Charity. Creatives from around the world are invited to interpret the tracks in their own style for every 7”.

Background / Considerations

You should aim to explore the visual semiotics of the track from a personal perspective, how do you interpret the content, lyrics, genre, style etc in a visual sense. Begin but don't limit your visual research by examining celebrated music artwork designers including; Peter Saville Jamie Reed Annie Leibovitz Storm Thorgerson Fred Deakin Mark Farrow Leif Podhajsky You need people to see your work and the essence of graphic design is communication. There is no value producing work for it to be placed in a drawer. Often the best work or best ideas are the ones that people have seen. You must get use to distributing your work at the any available opportunity. Remember design is about doing. This is an opportunity to visually and conceptually exploit every possible angle of your ideas. We are expecting a visual feast of ideas before you even consider resolving the problem. .

Mandatory Requirements

Final resolution as specified in the competition brief. Examples of the four sleeves you didn’t select to enter. A min of thirty “thumbnail” possible design treatments and supporting design development work. Documentation on your blog and design sheets.

Deliverables

FIVE visual variations of your chosen record sleeve. Design Boards which document your final Design For this brief I was really excited as this was the first opportunity that we has got to getting out work into a competition outside of out usual classroom, this would be beneficial to us as it would give us an insight into this but it would also be our first insight into completing a brief not set through the university giving us our first feeling of what the standard and way of work is like in the real life industry. My understanding is that we were to chose one of the listed songs that were decided by the secret 7" hosts and then design a 7" vinyl album cover for the song and during the creation of this vinyl cover these rules would have to be followed; Other than the boring technical file details that would have to be met such as it be set up in CYMK, be set at 300dpi, and be the exact size of file data and measurement wise stated the most important rule that I had to text in context was "Your Design Must Not Feature The Artist's Name Or Song Title" which was of course to keep in context with the secret part to the brief.  After a lot of listening over and over again to each of the tracks that we were allow to design for I picked my track based on my favourite music-wise out of the choices as I believe that If I enjoyed the song more it may be easier to design for and so therefore I chose to design for Digital Witness - St Vincent. For the first idea generation stage and in preperation for the first crit of the uni I had to choose the song that I was doing (which I already had) and then draw out at least ten different sketched and then further these inital sketches into fully hand drawn initial ideas so they could be taken to the crit and people could comment on them, the only think I had decided that was due to the nature of the rest of the previous work from the year I had been using a lot of vector shapes so I had decided that instead I wanted to do something a little different possibly hand drawn illustration or photogrpahy but before this stage I will do some research in design for album covers (influential by status and my taste in design) and I will also look slightly into the meaning of the song through the song lyrics and other information. SONG LYRICS Get back, to your seat Get back, gnashing teeth Ooh, I want all of your mind People turn the TV on, it looks just like a window, yeah People turn the TV on, it looks just like a window, yeah Digital witnesses, what's the point of even sleeping? If I can't show it, if you can't see me What's the point of doing anything? This is no time for confessing I want all of your mind People turn the TV on, it looks just like a window, yeah People turn the TV on, it looks just like a window, yeah Digital witnesses, what's the point of even sleeping? If I can't show it, if you can't see me Watch me jump right off the London Bridge This is no time for confessing People turn the TV on and throw it out the window, yeah Get back to your stare I care, but I don't care Oh oh, I, I want all of your mind Give me all of your mind I want all of your mind Give me all of it Digital witnesses, what's the point of even sleeping? If I can't show it, if you can't see me What's the point of doing anything? What's the point of even sleeping? So I stopped sleeping, yeah I stopped sleeping Won't somebody sell me back to me? I then looked at the video for inspiration and when I compared this with the lyrics to the song the meaning and thought process that was intended by the song became apparent; I was looking at the video so that I could take inspiration from the meaning but not the design style as I wanted to try and display the meaning through my album cover but in a totally different way than the original music video does. When watching the video and looking at the lyrics the underlying meaning of the fact that the video symbolises the fact that as a nation, and all over the world we are becoming totally asphyxiated with social media tat we are loosing touch and contact with the normal world and that we are becoming too involved in the whole technological revolution and the fact that we need to take a step back for a moment from it all. This is being displayed in the video even further through the video with the bland colour schemes, order and regimented feel with a lot of the song being repeated and the feature of the video the people are very regimented that she is trying to allude to the fact that we aren't only too engrossed in this technological world in fact we are a step past that and that we ave almost become zombies because of this. I found an interview that St Vincent did for the guardian in which she talks about her stance on this whole "technological revolution" and thought it would be an interesting way to gain an almost for of research into the meaning of the song; "We perform our identities in the analogue and digital realm. Every tweet or T-shirt is a signifier that consciously or subconsciously communicates something about us to others. I watch my performing identity and it reminds me of being six. We had a bathroom that was mirrored on three sides (was that weird? Is that like realising your parents had silk sheets or a Hitachi Magic Wand?). Anyway, I remember looking into one side of the mirror and seeing the reflection go on forever. I thought, if only I could tilt my head at just the perfect angle I'd actually be able to see "infinity". Hello self! Here are your many echoes! The further they get from the source, the smaller and less substantial they become. I finally turned my books around. They are messy, but at least I'm reading" RESEARCH INITIAL GENERATION I then fully hand rendered my favourite of all my design ideas that I had come up with and took them into the crit. In the crit I explained that what I wanted to do was step away from an overwhelming use of computer programs and step more towards photography and photo editing for this unit the majority of my designs wouldn't have supported this and therefore the feedback I got from the crit was very positive as I explained that with design eight and nine that I had drawn that I would do it through photography and my peers really like the idea, I found this out because I labeled my designs and then on a big supporting sheet my peers were asked to mark on a tally which of the designs was their favourite and then also write some feedback along with it. The feedback that I got was fantastic! everyone agreed that I had fully grasped the hidden meaning of the song and that I was displaying this meaning perfectly though my ideas and the majority agreed that it would be most interesting for me to pursue down the avenue of the photographic design styles and see where this could go, but along side this feedback they said that it might still be beneficial to try the digitally produced route incase the first methods didn't work very well the digitally done vectors would fit perfectly. With all of the feedback in mind I set out with the creation of my final album cover designs and here were the end results; Because of the fact that I believe the photography based idea's had come together so well I decided that I would definitely go ahead and use that idea as my final submission and therefore I chose this piece below and submitted it, and with it below is an application to show what the vinyl would look like in a real life situation; My final design was crit'd and overall the reviews were mixed as they really like the design aesthetically and they also thought that the idea behind the keyboard and the slight editing I had done to it and its links to the meanings of the song. Although they weren't too happy with the fact that to someone who didn't know what the song what about or even what song it is the meaning that I displayed though the cover might become slightly un-obvious and confusing. Although I believe this really wasn't a negative comment as the whole idea for the whole secret 7" brief revolves around this and the fact that it is mean to be a secret. Overall for this unit I was very happy because it allowed me to try something that I haven't done much of before and not only that but something that was different to the way that the majority or the my peers were completing the brief and overall I thought that it came together to actually look quite professional and I thought that I couldn't have displayed the meaning of the song through the art work any better. For the final submission to go along side the document we had to include a description of which could be a maximum of 140 characters and here is mine "A visual depiction informing the audience to take back control of their lives against the overwhelming burden of a social media lifestyle" and with this it was not submitted! Some time later I heard back from the secret 7" team and unfortunately I hadn't won a place! I wasn't going to let this get me down though as I was very happy with my final outcome and how it came out and will definitely be entering the competition again next year.