Graphic Design: Beginners course at St Martins & designing an album cover

Last term (Oct-Dec 2008 ) I took the Beginners Graphic Design course at St Martins in London. I would like to thank Belinda and Oliver for an informative and fun 10 weeks; guys, I learnt a lot!

The St Martins experience

Most of the sessions were about introducing us to an idea, and giving us time to experiment with it. It was good to get my hands dirty and try things out without worrying too much about the finished product. Obviously it would be great to get things perfect all the time; but if an idea didn’t pan out, it could be evaluated for what did/didn’t work, and learnt from for the next attempt.

There was also a lot of focus on crits – for those who don’t know, this is where we get to stand around and praise/slate each others work. Constructively, of course! It’s actually a really good learning tool, because you really get to assess your work in an honest environment, and (hopefully) draw from the comments to improve on it. You also get to see what everyone else is doing, and pinch… sorry, appropriate… any good ideas!

I probably found this part of the course the most useful (especially in relation to my job), as it’s helped to develop my evaluation skills and through this I’ve learnt how to better articulate what works and what doesn’t in a piece of design.

The main project

…to design an album cover: a dream project – although this of course was a purely hypothetical exercise and the result will not be stacked on the shelves in HMV. For this I chose the re-design the sleeve of the first Interpol album: Turn on the bright lights. Interpol are an Anglo-American 4 piece based out of New York; comparisons have been drawn with the likes of Joy Division, and I’d say that the music from this album is moody, atmospheric and bloody brilliant – this is just my personal opinion though, i’m not a music critic!

The moody and atmospheric part was something that I wanted to represent in my design:

Sleeve design

I wanted the band name to be subtle – though not to the point where is is unrecognizable to a brief glance. Edging the letters in red and making them similar in colour to the background (the letters are black, the background off-black) achieved the subtlety. To ensure they didn’t become invisible I had to increase the letter size substantially. This gave me the idea to put them into a 3×3 grid, split by syllable, to take up the entire cover; almost: the letters aren’t quite square. Finally I wanted the name of the album to form the filament of a lightbulb.

Booklet design

For the interior of the booklet I chose a couple of photographs of the band to paint from. I upped the contrast on the photos, to filter out a lot of the mid-range tones, and opted to limit myself to using black paint, in an effort to develop the moody/atmospheric theme further through the design. These were all done using acrylic paint, which when slapped thickly on to the paper has a lovely textured feel.

It was suggested that I should re-photograph these paintings, lighting them so to highlight the texture of the paint. Initially the white-balance on the camera killed the effect a bit – making it look a bit more like a sparkle. After switching this off, the camera picked up the yellow glow from my lamp, producing a much better result: like the glow of artificial light you’d get in a small, sweaty gig venue.

This was a project that I enjoyed very much, and am pleased with the result. I had the cover professionally printed, and mocked it all up in a CD case (and yes, you can even play the CD).

Thanks for reading!
Andy.x