Love and Pain and Beauty is a garage-made Midwest emo band with nothing left to lose.

Project Type

Explorative

Programs

Photoshop
After Effects

Keywords

Heartbroken
Boyish
2010’s

Love and Pain and Beauty

We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty.

The parameters for this project were to design a vinyl album cover and to create a paring “digital experience” for a fictitious band or musician. We were randomly assigned said fictitious band/musician using a Random Wikipedia Page, and the title of our album was pulled from a randomly generated quote from this page.

I was aigned the band name ‘U.S. Route 25W’ and chose the album title ‘Love and Pain and Beauty’, shortened and stylized from this quote.

Inspiration

Type 1: Photographic Composite

Typically, album covers of this ‘genre’ tend to be shots of either the singers/band members themselves, or images of cities, fields, animals, or other random scenes that one could describe as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘melancholic’, typically to match the tone of the music.

Type 2: Crudely Drawn Portrait

Typically, album covers of this ‘genre’ tend to be hand drawn sketches or fully rendered pictures of the singers/band members themselves. Sometimes they’re a little bit scary or give me a weird feeling. Which, granted, does match the tone of the music sometimes! I just do not always like looking at it!

I want to somehow combine these two styles to get the look that I want. I picked out three album covers that I felt like stood out above the rest in terms of what I was looking for. I think that these album covers are each an example of the way I could go about it and would be a good direction to start in, but ideally I'd like the final version to be a bit more ‘scrapbook' like.

I think this one combines the photo on the left with the marker text on the right very well. It looks like both elements might have been photographed and then digitally altered a bit, but I think it makes the combination very like seamless. I like the color grading as well, it looks a little warm and rustic, and I think including that in my album over as well as some handwriting would be nice.

I think that this cover combines the photography and digitally drawn elements in a sliighty uncanny way, but I think it still works very well because of the way that the drawing and photo interact. Instead of the drawings statically sitting on top of the photo, they make eye contact with and hold the photo. Almost as if the drawing took the picture himself it and is showing it off.

I think this one is the most... dramatic? I again really like the ‘distant color grading. It helps to age/date the imagery in a way that makes it feel melancholic despite having so many warm colors. I like that the original photo of the couple was taken away from, rather than added to. The figure of the man has been replaced by the rainbow gradient, and I feel like due to the chaotic background having so much color, it isn't out of place.

Expectation versus Reality

Thoughts

This was my initial sketch (very crude, I know) and first draft of my album cover. My issue with this draft is that I want it to feel more... “collage”-y, for lack of a better word. While it does give me that ‘I made this myself’ feeling that I wanted, it’s almost... too literal? I couldn’t think of a way to incoorporate the text without it feeling too out of place. I ended up creating this synthetic-realistic scene that I couldn’t add much imagination into without breaking the reality.

I like the overall vibe of it, but it’s just not quite the right aesthetic for me. It’s bright enough, but not ‘homemade’ enough.

I took various photos of different objects to create this “collage”. I thought by finding some objects and getting some from offline I could get this nice early 2000’s photobash vibe. It’s there, just not in the way that I want. Not every photo was included.