Albumn Cover Redesign
The album chosen for this redesign is Imogen Heap’s self-produced album “Speak for Yourself”, a collection of songs she had written over the years from various different times of her life. It is an album heavily focused on memorable emotions and moments throughout the musician’s life. The design elements used for this album redesign were ambiguity and series/sequences. The ambiguity of this design is shown through the use of random and strange imagery, all of which have no immediate connection or theme with each other, leaving the viewer with questions about the design.
First Drafts
The ambiguity is given context through the music as each of the 12 framed images correlates to one of 12 songs on the album. While these images are unrelated to each other, a sense of connection is made as each one is placed within a frame, therefore creating a series. This captures the idea that each of these songs is representative of a moment in time from Imogen Heap’s life. Furthermore, this all ties into the sequence component as the order of the framed images, starting at the top left and going clockwise around the title of the album, represent the songs as they are ordered on the album. Multiple butterflies are placed across the front and back cover to represent the artist, who has often used butterfly imagery in her career.
The butterfly motif is the most present in the zoetrope design, where a caterpillar is shown going through metamorphosis to become a butterfly before flying away. Just like the picture frames, the metamorphosis represents the artist’s life and the various phases she has gone through. The colors chosen also reflect the collection of emotions felt in each song, as the blue alludes to sadder moments while the orange is more representative of the brighter, upbeat songs on the album. The typefaces used are Ransom and American Typewriter. Ransom is only ever used for the album title and helps play into the mismatched ambiguity of the album. The true goal of this design was to create a visual representation of the artist as she uses her music to reflect back upon various moments in her life, and while each memory is different, the full story is only told when all of them are put together.
