Single Artwork: Holae Molae!
Project: Freelance project for local Toronto musician DayAdams
Task: Design a static as well as an animated song cover for DayAdams’ new song HOLAE MOLAE!
Reference Images
Client: “I want October Halloween vibes”
I began by listening to the song & looking at the reference images supplied by the the client to begin generating an idea.
Process Work & Iterations
I choose to start with the font because I feel as though a font is a super effective way of evoking emotion. Also since its a song cover, the font is quite important and arguably the focal point of the cover, allowing it to easily drive the rest of the design.
The first iteration was to begin experimenting with different colours.
I decided that I wanted to keep it simple and have one large solid image in the back. I wanted to use some sort of skull, an Idea I got from the reference images.
I found an image of a skull that I liked online and edited it to make it look kind of like it was decaying.
At this point, the cover looked to simple to me (image below on the left) and I wanted to add additional details. I did this by duplicating the skull and overlaying it over the original one.
Next, I used colour tools to pick colours that contrasted well and I experimented with the font size.
I eventually choose to duplicate the text and overlay it, smilier to what I did with the skull to make the title pop more
Finally, I added the artist’s name at the bottom (similar to how it’s done in his previous song covers to keep consistent with his branding).
I imported the assets into Adobe After Effects and experimented with and applied some effects and the audio to the song cover. Once again, I looked back at the reference images in order to get a good understanding of what animation style the client was looking for.
At the end of the clip, after the skull animation is finished, I made the artist’s name fade in so the user’s attention is drawn there and people are reminded of who made the song.
Result:
Animated Cover:
Static Cover:
Stream the full song below!