Study Task 1 - Secret 7 last year

I chose a song from the 2015 competition, to get a feel for how the competition works. I chose to create an album cover for the Chemical Brothers 1999 hit 'Let Forever Be' a song co written and sung by Noel Gallagher. I looked at the lyrics and sound of the song to get a feel for its meaning and rhythm of the song, I wanted to produce a front cover which simply showed the song in a subtle way.

This was the single cover from the original release of the song originally meant to be a B side yet was the second single release on there album 'Surrender'. The song was not there biggest hit but gave them a top ten spot in a number of countries. The song has a massive oasis feel to it brought in by the collaboration of Gallagher. The song also has a phsycedelic feel to it and has a lot of guitar mixed with rhythmic drum beats creating a catchy song.

The video to the song gained more praise and accolades than the song itself, directed by Michael Gondry, the video utilize ground-breaking video effects in its depiction of a young woman's nightmares. The video uses a number of women all dressed to look the same and dance in unison to create the vision of dreams and nightmares and being afraid of life to, hiding in bed. The video is rather disturbing in a way that it depicts fear and insignificance of a young woman.

I began drawing up small thumbnail design ideas of what I wanted to use within my album cover. I kept to the rules of Secret 7, avoiding using type and clear visual representations of the song. I took inspiration from the video, lyrics, sound and the original album art.

I wanted to create a feeling of forever, so began working with circles which are a representative of forever through there shape which is never ending in a sense. I disrupted these circles to represent the meaning of the video with nightmares disrupting the womans sleep. The colours are taken from the original album art which uses just red and blue and a colour combination of the two. It is simple and subtle and each design factor is backed up.

I went with a more literal approach using a scene from the music video of the song where the character keeps being awoken by an alarm clock. I drew up a clock and again used shapes and colour relevant to the song to represent disruption of sleep. The response from the critique of these was to work on it more, positioning and size of the shapes.

I chose this to be my final design for the single cover. Again I have used the colours from the original single cover art with an added white circle of which I have turned the opacity to 50% so it doesnt over shadow or over power the other two main colours of red and blue. The circle again represents forever and I have repeated the circles to represent the message of the video of dreams within dreams, the shapes placed like this also gives the design depth and creates a striking visual like the songs vocals and guitar create striking noise. The design is simple yet all parts of it are relevant and linked to the song.