OUGD406
Studio Brief 01
Research

For this part of research I looked into designers and artist who specialise in album artwork, I wanted to focus on certain styles and the process each designer / artist goes through when designing a cover, to see if it could possibly help me when I come to designing my chosen tracks cover. 

Kero
Kero is a highly talented illustrator and visual artist from Italy, she designs intricate and detailed record sleeves and works as the in house illustrator for music label, Life and Death. Her work for Life  and death is what made me look into her work about a year ago, as the covers are a stitching of imagery with text in a collage type format, that prefer to exhibit marks of the artists rather than trying to achieve flawless or a cleaned up approach. The way she designs the covers is inspiring as for Secret 7, I have exhibit marks of the track but trying not to communicate in a obvious way. In an interview with Inverted Audio, Kero discusses what mediums and materials she uses 'I've been using almost all the materials and resources out there: ink, pencils, watercolours, acrylics, etching, collage... you name it, but I never liked oils, too slow and smelly' to see she uses a wide range of mediums and materials, made me consider which approach to take when producing the cover, too often I find myself printing digitally when I should be using the facilities around me at college more.

Jack Featherstone
Jack Featherstone specialises across art direction, animation and graphic design and I came across his work when I bought Simian Mobile Discos latest album 'Whorl'. He designed visuals not just for the album but also the live performances, the visuals are psychedelic created using digital and analogue technologies, so the ways in which you can create album artwork is ceaseless. In an interview I read that jack often likes to dream up certain environments or a language and explore it within a length of the track, this could be way in which I could create ideas for my chosen track.

Peter Saville
Peter Saville is one Britain's most well known designers, famed for his work for Factory records and  most notably Joy Divisions album Unknown pleasures. The first time I found out about Peter Saville was when I was watching 24 hour party people about one year ago, in which Saville is portrayed as a laid back designer constantly missing deadlines, after watching the film I went onto look at his work for the Hacienda nights and New Order, but for this research I wanted to know his process and after some extensive research it seems Saville likes to take imagery and almost recycle it, such as the 19th century oil painting used in New Orders album, Power, corruption and lies, he then finely added a technicolored coded system to the side to give the cover some essence. The process Saville used could potentially work for one of seven tracks for Secret 7 and could give a design true ambiguity.

Stefan Sagmeister
I follow Sagmeister on Instagram and on a daily basis he uploads a picture of four album covers to his feed, I'm not sure whether or not this is current project he's working on, or perhaps it could be the records he listens to during the day in the studio. Nonetheless, the constant feed of album cover designs can help with my research for this brief because he always credits the designer or artist in the description so to see other notable designers music related work can influence my designs.