OUGD406 Studio Brief 1 | The Brief

"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”. "

"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."
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For the first brief of OUGD406 it was a live brief called ‘Secret 7.’

This was a competition where people from all over the world entered their submissions for alternative album artwork for a list of selected tracks. This years track list was made up of;  Born Slippy - Underworld, Let Forever Be - The Chemical Brothers, Reflections - Diana Ross & The Supremes, Go - The Maccabees, Sledgehammer - Peter Gabriel, Dead Flowers - The Rolling Stones and Digital Witness - St Vincent.

The selection of songs various across genres and age groups so it doesn’t seem that it’s obvious who will pick what song or songs to do.

There are some restriction when it comes to designing set by Secret 7; the artist name, picture and song title can’t be displayed on the front of the sleeve. Although this was challenging, I found it interesting that I was to find a way to communicate a song just through image.

At the start of this brief I remember thinking that once I chose a song, I was going to look into a lot of various ideas to make sure I got the best possible outcome. 

The first thing I did was listen to each of the songs multiple times while also doing research on them and the lyrics, this allowed me to get a feel of what each song was about and what they meant. My research continued by looking into celebrated music artwork designers and their work. 

Overall, at the start of this brief I was very excited to get going, even though we had a rather small time frame to do complete it. I feel this brief could have gone better.