Imperium
Short Explanation
Imperium (2020) is the title of a collaborative mini-album by the duo Deo & Gregory Go. The album is currently available to stream at Youtube. In this project I was involved in providing the artwork for the album's digital release.
Project Goals
The primary goal of this project was to provide the artwork and album cover that could perfectly captures the sound of the album in the form of visual artwork.
Knowledge Gathering
In order to capture the mood and the sound of the album completely, I decided to schedule a meeting and interview between the two musicians. The duo comes from a very different musical background and references, with Gregory Go having a passion in techno music and Deo as a seasoned arranger and clarinet player in multiple orchestra. Think of it as part of requirement gathering similar to any engineering task. Lastly, I also got to listen to the demo of the album to capture the spirit of the album.
My personal takeaways from this was that the produced music can also be described as these 2 worlds colliding in one mini-album. This leads to one conclusive vision for the artwork; to combine the spirit of techno (future) and baroque (past) music. And so that leads to the moodboard for the artwork.
Moodboard
The Implementation
To have a better vision of what the album cover could look like, I started searching for Renaissance paintings first. This was done to try to capture the Renaissance spirit of the songs in Imperium. After searching a lot of Renaissance painting that fits the moodboard, I stumbled upon "The Fall of The Rebel Angel" by Pieter Bruegel (1562). I then decided to fit this painting into the cover for the dynamics and mood of the painting which I thought fit very well to the album's heavy characteristics. Additionally, the choice to use this painting was influenced by the fact that "The Fall of The Rebel Angel" is in the public domain. Being public domain allowed us to utilize the artwork without any licensing restrictions, ensuring that we could freely incorporate its powerful imagery into our album cover design.
In order to also represent the electronic music influence, I decided to use a rainbow line to add colors and composition of the cover as well as adding the album title and the musicians' names. For the texts, I used Graphique Pro Next font.
After talking to the musicians about the process, difficulty, and my own limitations, they agreed on having me use an excerpt of a Renaissance painting for the artwork.
