Project developed for Experimental Typography course, the brief was to design album artwork for individual songs on an album of choice. The images could only display typography with no images or illustrations.
For this project I chose to design album artwork for Dark York, the first mixtape by LE1F, New York based rapper. His songs in this mixtape are very unique, new age rap that fuses atmospheric melodies and electronic beats. This skewed blend of music LE1F creates reminded me of visual distortions. I developed a system of distorting each image that creates unique visuals for each album. The process included manual rendering of type, scanning distortion, photoshop edits and a glitch applications that randomly distorts each image. Legibility was not a concern for this project because of the context the artwork would be displayed, most mp3 players now show both the song title and artist of the song currently playing.
The results are 21 unique album covers that still carry a consistent theme that reflects the album as a whole. Some songs from LE1F's mixtape don't include any text and instead utilize a collection of typographic symbols which gave very interesting results.
