OUGD406 - Studio brief 1 - Idea Development

To create my final 5 ideas, I had to have a definite song choice. Looking back on my thumbnail designs, I had more ideas that were relevant to St. Vincent rather than  The Maccabees. I also prefer the message in Digital Witness, as it's strong, easy to portray and relevant in today's society. 

My first design was taken from the video its self. I saw the opening shot of the video, and the lead singer was stood in a bleak room with some blinds hung up and no window. One of the lyrics also states "people turn the TV on, it looks just like a window". I decided to take these blinds and vectorise them, giving a subtle hint as to what song it was: 

I came up with this design fairly quickly and easily. I liked the black and white as it's simplistic and doesn't hold any correlation to the video with the bright colours. 

From this design, I wanted to be a bit more experimental. I decided to hand draw some textures and add those into my design and play around with colours and textures on photoshop. 
I started with this design that I drew: 

I placed the drawing in photoshop and experimented with colours and textures. I decided to add a lyric from the song as the image looked totally ambigous without it. I placed "whats the point" on it, as it the image its self looked quite messy and not thought through: 

The original design was quite light and the drawing scan was quite pixelated. I decided to take the drawing into illustrator and image trace it to get a smoother finish. 

The overall image was darker but I felt like it fit the theme I was going for. 

The next idea I came up with was something from my thumbnail sheet. I wanted to use the word "yeah" in a speech bubble, as she says that word a lot in the song, but it isn't specific to her as it's a commonly used word. I wanted the design to be bold and striking with lots of colours. I think these designs look better abstract, with no clear meaning, because then the identity of the album is a secret. 

I played around with the composition of the image, and had the background "YEAH"s on an angle of 30 degrees, and I found this created a more interesting image due to the colour overlays:

My text idea was inspired by the artwork of Tara Mcphereson, using pale muted colours to create an abstract looking scene. I was also inspired by the lyrics "whats the point of even sleeping" and "watch me jump right off the london bridge" from the song. I had an idea of what I wanted the scene to look like in my head, with a running theme of pink and purple.

I started with a pale pink background and added the mountains with a simple shading effect. I added a red line at the back to help me envision the horizon. 

Next, I added mist using a paler colour and using the blur took to make it look like mist. I also darkened the mountains because they faded into the background too much.

Once I was happy with the mist, I started to work on the sky. I wanted it to look like a sunset, so I added a purple creeping in from the corners, with pink slowly descending into the middle.

Once the background of the sky was done, I added stars and a large moon to make it look more surreal and interesting. 

Finally, I added a vector girl falling from the sky, and about to plummet through the mist. This design was inspired by the lyrics from the song, "what's the point of even sleeping?" from the dream like qualities of this image, and also "watch me jump right off the london bridge", as there is a girl falling from the sky. 

I feel like this design has no clear message, but has actually been created with a concept in mind.

My next design was inspired by the overall message in the song. I wanted to tag-line it "too much computer?" as these are not direct lyrics, but relate to the song well. I took pictures of my hands and vectorised them using illustrator, and added interesting textures and lines to them:

The hands were supposed to be crippled due to RSI and the over use of a keyboard. I  thought I would take it a step further and add in bones, so it looked like the hands had actually fallen off due to over use:

I also changed the background colour to white as I thought it complimented the colour of the hands better. 

My final design is quite a simple vector idea. I created a spiral shape in illustrator and used it as eyes for a person. I wanted them to look hypnotized, and I wanted the image to also hypnotize the viewer. 

I feel like this design is quite simple and effective, and communicates the message of the song well, as technology is very addictive in todays society.