YEAR
Fall 2019
SKILLS
Branding
Photography
Illustration
Animation
Gone Now - Bleachers
Gone Now is the sophomore album by Bleachers. Bleachers is the official stage name of musician Jack Antonoff. Within the album Antonoff explores the concept of the passage of time and the feeling that all moments are fleeting. He explains this feeling of loss and confusion associated with the passage of time. Antonoff talks about what it feels like to lose something or someone, and afterwards not knowing how to move forward, where to go, or where to call home. The redesigned cover is my visual interpretation of the themes within the album. I also designed merchandise that reinforce my concept and push it even further conceptually.
IDEATION AND PROCESS
I started my process by mind-mapping imagery I associated with the lyrics and mood of the album. Afterwards, I ideated concept; brainstorming what exactly Antonoff was trying to capture within Gone Now. After deciding what themes and ideas he was focused on, I ideated visual metaphor that conveyed these emotions. I decided on a tangled and distorted vision of a city with a person missing in the foreground. It's unclear where the person is going. This image represents the dizzying feelings of loss and confusion captured within Gone Now. It's intentionally jarring and uncomfortable, mirroring the visceral emotions. The people are highlighted with color to represent that in the midst of chaos in our lives, the people around us can be beacons of stability and perspective and help bring us back to reality.
ALBUM COVER/BACK + DETAILS
The images composing the collage are photographs I have taken on road-trips and cities I have visited. I used my photography to give each image a personal feel, starkly juxtaposed with the disconnected image of the collage as a whole. I physically cut out the silhouette of the missing person to give physicality to the cover and further reinforce the absence of the individual. The collage leads to a focal point in the center of the confusion, and this is also physically cut out to emphasize the lack of direction and destination. I chose red as the color because of the urgency it brings to the design.
To make sure that my design spread across platforms and would reach streaming audiences, I created digital Spotify materials to go along with the album cover redesign. To the right is a "Now Playing" animation for the song Everybody Lost Somebody. Click for sound.
I also created merchandise to go along with the album. I created a tour poster and collectible calendar. Because concerts and live music are a catharsis of emotion the tour poster takes the concept of the album and flips it. The person who is missing comes back to the foreground, and the confusing and chaotic picture of the city fades to a sketchy drawing in the back. I created the calendar as merchandise as a kind of ironic take on the album which talks so much about the restrictive and overwhelming nature of the passage of time.
