Design
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Almost every month, I’ll come across at least one discourse about design becoming too analogous and there being no originality anymore. While in some design spaces that thinking can be somewhat true (one instance that comes to mind is the whole debate on “flat human” illustration in the tech world), you don’t need to look much further to see a world of design that breaks pretty much every single rule of design some of us learn when building our foundation.
I’m talking about the music industry.
Merchandise from French DJ, Madeon
Snapshot from Ariana Grande’s Positions lyric video
Personally, the first time I really took in the experimental design of music merchandise and album art was when Kanye West released The Life of Pablo. Now don’t come looking here for an album review, I haven’t truly listened to a Kanye song since Monster. When I first saw the cover art, I was so confused. Thinking *is this it? This is what money was put into?* Looking back at the cover art to write this, I’m so surprised at how influential this simple design is. Overlaying text with photography? One of my favourite design layouts. Duplicates of one line of text as a background or element? So common now in areas like Instagram stories and sweatshirts.
Kanye’s The Life of Pablo artwork
“Kids See Ghosts” merchandise from 2018
Stepping into more familiar territory, Porter Robinson, an artist that I’ve adored for quite some time also seems to break the mold in a different way as well. Several of his music videos for new releases differentiate from common practices. Take the lyric video for his single, Look at the Sky, where the text overlaps, becomes unreadable at some parts and has very wide tracking at some points. All of those aspects are frowned upon by design industry standards. But in the music space? It fits so well. His love of creating a connection with fans is really prominent in the website that hosts an interactive game accompanying his music. Just another step above the normal of a typical artist’s website where you would be brought to a page to immediately be brought to either iTunes, Spotify or YouTube.
Experience his website here: https://www.porterrobinson.com/