WMC celebrates the creative space where visual art and music intersects. We can’t attend WMC Fest this year, so we invited Dribbbling WMCFesters Finley, Brandon Rike, Caroline Moore and Jon Contino to discuss employing a visual medium to express an audible art. If you missed past posts, click and read about WMC Fest, Jeff Finley’s work for his band Campfire Conspiracy, Brandon Rike’s work for folk rockers Mumford & Sons, and Caroline Moore’s work for Petticoat Lane.
By Jon Contino
Designer • Co-founder & Creative Director of CXXVI Clothing • @joncontino on Twitter
For this [Incendiary] record, I had a little bit of help to influence me. The first thing is that I already love the band. When you like the band you’re designing for, it’s pretty much the most fun thing you can do. You get an advanced copy of the record, you get to influence the visual style of where the band will be headed, and you get to be the fifth or sixth member for a couple weeks. This is the kind of work I started with as a new freelancer, so it feels like I was going back to my roots. I spent the majority of my early freelance days (ages 14 to 21) working exclusively with bands on stuff as small as demos all the way up to major releases and packaging, so it felt good doing it all over again.
The next thing that helped was that I already did a T-shirt for these guys, so I already knew what they liked. With T-shirt designs, you can really get a sense of the band’s vibe in one shot. It’s almost like creating a logo, you need to capture a thousand words in one image, so it’s a great introduction into what the elements for a record package will be.
The last piece to help out was that they had a general idea of what they wanted. It wasn’t just “make it cool,” it was actual, good, in-depth thought as to what should be happening. This particular image is actually based on one of the lyrics and a visual the band thought was important to feature somewhere on the record. So with all these guidelines and the years I got under my belt, I pretty much took what I knew and ran with it. After a few concepts, we had the general idea locked down and I put in all the details and stuff that make something like this special.
Music design in general is a special breed. It’s one of the rare instances where you have to be creative for other creative people, so it kind of forces you into weird places. Actually, it can be the greatest design experience you have or the worst, it just matters how you handle it and if you can adjust to what life was like before you had to worry about explaining abstract concepts to corporate shills.
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