PPP - Personal Experimentation - Desert Boys

I really wanted to do some branding for a band, designing vinyl sleeves, logos, j-cards etc. I’ve asked quite a few people but got no responses as of yet so I decided too just create a fictional band and go for it. This fictional band are called the Desert Boys, and they’re a modern alternative rock & roll band who want a very contemporary and eye catching vinyl sleeve, gig poster and j-card.

I started by editing a few desert based images - a desert scene and an image of a cow skull. I created a colour palette to restrict my designs to in order to create continuity between the designs. I created a modern logotype by stretching blackletter type. I started with the J-Card, laying out images and type and just playing around; in started thinking about visualising music and music production and looked at some of the hardware. On a mixing desk, you get those vertical LCD little screens with bars that go up and down depending on the volume level. I started visualising these with gradients and ultimately this in formed a very gridded layout, thinking about the grid and structure of the mixing desk and the way all the buttons and everything are logically organised. This gridded approach was also taken for the vinyl sleeve, and while this does add this element of structure to the layout, I wanted to add this conflicting element of disarray, representing rock & roll, so this is way I chan ged the orientation of the track names, added in blue images of the cow skull which contrasts the orange and really emphasised the logotype which is very stylised and pushes the boat out in terms of legibility. For the gig posters, I pulled it back a bit, because the function of the poster is to communicate to people on the street so it needs to be more legible. I used the cow skull as a primary image and edited the logotype, stretching it even more and making it just into a white outline which in placed on top of the image, creating almost like a deserty dust or smoke. 

I really like this set of designs, I think the design style is cool and contemporary and they work really well as a set, which was the aim of this perusal project, to exercise my skills in branding, and creating thus brand amongst multiple touchpoint. My J-Card design even got featured on Instagram by an account called modern cassette, who posts J-Card designs.