Intro
In our first breif, 12″, we had to design the front cover for one of nine different records that are thought of as massive musical influences for their respective genres. This album cover had to be submitted in a physical, 12″ x 12″ format, along with a mood board. We were told to research and take inspiration from other designers and the visual languages associated with our chosen style.
Ambient music emerged in the 70s/80s in the UK as new instruments such as synthesisers started becoming commercially available. Ambient music aims to alter a listener’s perception of the environment. Brian Eno, credited with “creating” ambient music, described it “as ignorable as it is interesting”.
Other ambient album artists
As you can see by looking at these examples, the album covers are reflective of the music itself. The more ‘weird’, expressive and alternative, the more unusual the album art; similarly minimalist and electronic ambient records feature similarly minimalist and electronically stylised art.
Idea generation/experimenting with design concepts
Due to my choice of designing the album art for Brain Eno, I had to use three oblique strategy cards throughout the design process. Oblique strategies are cards, randomly shuffled, each a different way to disrupt a creative process by suggesting a course of action or thinking. My first card stated: “Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor”. Personally I found that this confused me more than helped me, as it is so unusual and interpretive. Initially I wanted to only use one area of the page to design the album art, but instead decided to constrain myself in another way. On our lunch break my friends and I had raided a skating shop of their free magazines because we really liked the unusual photography, so I decided to use these magazines as the anchor for my mood board. I made three different mood boards for the one song, as the music changes throughout it.
My first coherent album cover idea was meant to capture the floating feeling that ambient music creates. I wanted to visualise this feeling though visualising a man floating through space, but using layering (inspired by the cover of a techno album I found in a vinyl shop). I combined the idea of floating and being surrounded by the music in the initial designs.
My next oblique strategy was “Look at the most embarrassing details and amplify them”. I decided to “amplify” the tears in the layered model of the first album cover. I experimented with tearing the album itself and layering with different colours, then using torn card as a stencil with spray paint.
I then continued developing the floating man on the vinyl but used splattered spray paint to create a “starry” effect. I really liked the idea of visualising space, and the environmental and ambient feeling. I decided to incorporate more imagery, I really liked the emotive visual message of floating through space, but decided to highlight the silence in the music, the gaps between notes and movements. After mind-mapping about silence and tranquillity, I decided to include imigary around marble statures, as they are very visually appealing in a minimalist and stylistic sense; and their associations with libraries and museums, both peaceful and quiet places.
Final Development
Finally, I decided to combine the imagery of the marble statue by using an image of Apollo’s head that I edited in Photoshop as a reference, and drawing constellations on the album, showing between the two halves of the head. This combined the minimalist imagery of the statue, and the spacey feeling.
The final cover’s minimalism reflects the style of Music for Airports 1/1, and shows the calming, spacey ambient emotive feeling of the record.
