OUGD406 | STUDIO BRIEF 1 | SECRET 7 | IDEA DEVELOPMENT & EXPERIMENTATION

After doing some further research and drawing up rough thumbnails, the next step was to be experimental on Photoshop. Since I had created a lot of scans of paint splatters and illustrations, I started with those as they capture the nature of the song well.

I created this using the two scans above, and messing with selective colour and the contrast. The blue and the yellow reflect the actual music video as they were the main colours used in it. The paint in the second scan I used a sponge on and then bleached it to achieve different tones of colour. 

Again sticking with the same colour theme, I combined some of the illustrations I scanned in with a photoshop brush. I'm unsure how successful this design is, in a sense the 'tension headache' text works well as there is a lot going on in the song, also it's a lyric from the song that I thought sounded interesting. The reason I put a square there is because there is one used on the music video so I thought I would consistently experiment with similar themes.

I experimented with the same scan on this design and changed the colours more drastically. I like the last one the most as it looks thermal. The primary colours along with the green work well against the really bold black. The drippy effect that I created by drawing, is supposed to reflect the actual title of the song without being too obvious. I'm unsure if this actually looks like a vinyl, or would work for the song, it looks too lighthearted and 'fun' when Born Slippy isn't a very cheery song.

As for this design, it was very experimental and kind of happened on it's own organically. I think it successfully appears to capture the effects of drugs because of the veins that I edited to make clearer, and the position of my pupil. I experimented with duo tone for this and I personally liked the pink and blue together, they really stand out. I wanted to more subtly add a different colour so I used one of my paint scans to make a Photoshop brush which acted as the yellow veins/dribbles. Overall it's a little bit spontaneous and not as thought out as my other designs but sometimes I feel these are the most fun to produce. It would have been good to produce similar versions in different colours to compare them.

Since Born Slippy .NUXX is used on the film Trainspotting I thought it would be interesting to use themes influenced by it. Even though I worry this may have been a route other designers took with the competition, I thought I would have a go at it anyway as it's all about trying to make your design stand out amongst the others.

Referring back to my thumbnails I produced a continuous line drawing of a spoon and a syringe, semantically conveying heroin/drugs/addiction. The line drawing looks messy, imbalanced and has flaws which is what I was aiming for. Having an addiction is never an easy thing, so a perfect drawing would not reflect what I wanted to communicate. The different bumps in the drawing suggest the ups and downs of dabbling in drugs. 

Although the singer of Underworld was singing about his addiction to alcohol, I still thought this worked as the song could portray addiction most substances. The use of heroin in my design was a stronger message than alcohol, I felt. 

I combined the drawing with more of my paint scans as I wanted to make the best use of them and they work well with the designs I am producing. I liked how subtle it looked on this first design. The blackness acts as the 'darkness' a person may face whilst battling with themselves, and the isolation they may feel. 

I like how the red on the end of the needle connotes blood and the colours change on the way down the drawing, but only show up on the white and not the black.

For these designs I first tried it in white. I knew I wanted to design something which appeared as though it was 'splitting', so I used paint and messed around with the hues to create multiple tones and colours. I selected certain circles from the scan and pasted them next to my line drawing, using blending modes. It was so easy to mess around and create different combinations. The black looks so much better than the white as the colours are more vivid. Towards the last designs I resized the circles so there was a more even focus on both features. To finish off, I inverted a scan of slightly crumpled paper and put it in the background to add more texture instead of it looking too flat.

The whole concept of this design is to show the effects of drugs, the last design is my personal favourite as, because of the primary colours, it looks thermal, representing the human body and temperature. The splitting represents how your life can be torn apart by the use of drugs, and I feel this is my most successful design, conceptually and aesthetically. 

Another idea I had was to play on the term "born" in the song's title, and the first thing that came to my mind was literally birth. I took this photo of me in the womb and edited it in photoshop.

Here it looks cleaner and stands out more. I took off my information as I didn't want that to be on a vinyl for everyone to see. I thought I would experiment more with colour and try and play on the 'slippy' part of the song title too. 

These were all quite experimental, I tried changing the colour using duotone and also adding lines that were messy and careless. These experiments however didn't seem strong, my favourite is the last one, the mauve colour works really well with the greys, even though it isn't as clear. 

These two are my favourite. Since cyan and red are my favourite colours to use I naturally find the anaglyph effect really appealing. This effect enables the pieces to look blurry and also reflect movement which can refer back to the term 'slippy'. Both versions I think have pros and cons, the black is more traditional but the colours stand out a lot more whereas the white/grey has a more interesting slant, but the shapes and colours do not stand out as well as the other, it looks a little more messy. I asked people in the class which they preferred:

It was interesting to find out that people liked the way the white one goes against traditional scan pictures.

Sticking to the same type of theme I created this by using a lyric that is heavily repeated in the song 'boy'. I like the colours that I've used here however I don't think this would be effective as a vinyl cover because the word looks as though it is the title of the song.

For these ideas I went back to the heroin/drug route but decided I wanted to use photography for this, in order to achieve a more realistic end result. My mum works in a hospital, and so I managed to acquire a syringe (without the needle) to take a picture of, however since it lacked the crucial needle part, I whipped out some craft skills and stuck a sewing needle in it. I added fairy liquid into the container as I wanted to be able to edit the colour to my preference during the design process:

I tried out the anaglyph effect again as I really like how it looks for this brief. I duplicated the layers with the syringe and edited the levels, then tilted them slightly so the needle stays in the same point.

The first two are my favourites as blue and yellow remind me of the music video and seem to work together pretty well. 

The one with all the primary colours for me looks a little too busy and doesn't really work as well as the two coloured ones. They're a lot more subtle. 

I think I have managed to create a lot of ideas that I can take forward and tweak for the interim crit.