WORN
The titular track ‘Worn’ has an underlying rich growl, a tone that sounds like it is warping and expanding across the stereo audio; I used this sound as a key reference to base my design around to produce a similar visual effect.
I used the natural designs of rocks and water to create a lava-like texture, and took inspiration from faulty computer monitors of the early 2000’s to interweave slight glitched textures into the design, to represent the use of sporadic electronic synth sounds over a guttural, rich, almost monstrous bass tone.
The text used, in a dried-ink typewriter font, was intentionally scattered to represent the ‘worn’ themes, almost as if the letters had been pasted on from pre-existing print or decayed and worn down over a longer period of time.
The centre labels were created in line with the red and black colour palette, to work with the circular design and represent the same black hole-like mass on the front cover. I also decided to use plain black vinyl for the records themselves, to pay homage to ‘dubplates’ of the electronic music scene in the UK through the 80s and 90s, where this genre of music had the most influence. Dubplates would be lathe-cut records pressed as a one-off for artists to either test their albums before mastering, or to market as an exclusive ‘in’ to unreleased tracks, driving audiences to purchase limited releases to feel part of an insider community for their favourite artists. As the client had not yet released these particular tracks, these albums would be created for a little bit of both purposes.
I created a rough mockup of the album design paired with the records to demonstrate how they would look together as a cohesive piece, which was then later sent onto the vinyl cutting house for production after the client had finalised the design.
The completed design files were then sent to a cutting house, who discussed the mastering preferences with the client before bringing the album into physical form.
As the client does not have a specific label and all production is their own, a QR code was added to the back (in lieu of a real barcode) containing links to their music, along with small personal touches such as a dummy barcode referencing their Instagram handle and credit to myself as designer as per their request.