Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Blasphemy!

I'm taking a course in typeface design and the assignment was to take something that was done in a particular style or school and reinterpret it in a different style. So, like an idiot, I chose to redesign The Beatles White Album. It seemed like a good idea at the time, of course voting for Ronald Reagan in 1980 seemed like a good idea too, but that's a different story. It turns out that the Beatles were planning on naming the album A Doll's House after the Ibsen play but shortly before its release another group released an album titled Song's From The Doll's House and it was determined that the similarities were too great so the Beatles scrapped the title altogether. This sent the design for the jacket cover in to a tailspin and without a title or concept (the album is just a collection of songs) it was decided to release the album without a jacket design - essentially blank. The white album design is quintessentially "modern" in the Swiss style and my challenge was to redesign it in a post-modern style, saddled with all the same limitations i.e., no title, concept or direction. I chose to create individual logos for all thirty songs and lay them out on the jacket as they would look when the jacket was unfolded (it's a double album).

1 comment:

  1. What makes this design meaningful, is that each song title, is created with fonts, and design that either reflect the title name, lyrics, or music of that song.

    I'm not familiar with the album, so I don't know the order of the songs (although I do know many of the songs on the album), but the layout works well. Visually you are drawn repeatedly around the design, without an easy visual escape.

    Very creative.

    Shawn

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