Album Cover Redesign
This project was to create a CD cover, back cover, spine, booklet, tray card, and label for an existing album to reimagine its visual language and experience.
I decided to redesign “Ginkgo” by Panchiko.
Existing Ginkgo album cover.
Goal:
Ginkgo has an innocent, dream-like sound, reminiscent of a calm spring breeze. I wanted to convey the overwhelming nostalgia that I experience when I hear the music. The original cover invokes something similar, but I wanted to visualize the feeling through my own lens.
Another objective I held myself to during this process was to make something that could stand out in a record store among thousands of other beautifully designed album covers, since that’s the primary purpose of album cover design.
Photo Sketching
Final Photos
Application
I found this kaleidoscope while brainstorming ideas for the cover, and it led my process. I used it to create all of the photos in this project, which needed hardly any editing for the final product.
As I was exploring what I could do with the kaleidoscope, I carried it with me and took photos through it with my iPhone. I was able to experiment more since I could do this anywhere, like sketching photographically. I refined my ideas through the DSLR later.
Color
I used Lubalin, a geometric sans serif typeface, to mirror the geometric imagery that the kaleidoscope produces.
The greatest challenge of adding type on the covers was avoiding competition between the type and photos.
Design
Typography
Soft gradients on the page opposite of each image provided a quiet space for the lyrics and established the photography as the focal point. For each page of the CD, I treated the type with a color from the image next to it. I saw this as a peaceful gust of wind that picked up from the image and left the song’s lyrics next to it, perfectly fitting my vision for this album.
Final CD Pages
