Xana Album Release Campaign Pieces
These are a series of pieces created for a new album release for the artist Xana. Her music style is generally a mix of punk-rock and pop but you can also find alternative and R&B in some of her songs. Her album titled “Tantrums” is split up into three parts: the lover, the brat, and the fool. As these are the main symbols of the album, I thought they would be interesting conceptually to build merchandise pieces around. I was also inspired by her original album art and wanted to create pieces that felt very hand-made and free-form, especially the social media posts.
Iteration
I first started out by writing out potential campaign pieces as well as breaking down the components and visuals for the merchandise and social media posts. I then sketched out the visual representations of the lover, brat, and fool that would be used in the merchandise. I created both line-based pieces and free-form designs for each word and then consulted my peer to decide the best direction to go with. Based on my feedback, I decided to go with the more organic pieces.
Once I was happy with my sketches, I brought them into illustrator to recreate them digitally. I chose to use the analogous color scheme of red, purple, and blue to help make all the pieces feel more cohesive. I also felt the colors worked well with the songs each part correlated to. Once I was happy with each illustration, I bagel applying them to the merchandise pieces along with the typefaces I felt best to fit the style and feel of the pieces and album (Verveine and Subway Berlin SC).
The watercolor patterns that were added to the t-shirt design and the stickers were created using spatter brushes in photoshop and then softened with erasers. I felt the background added more depth to the pieces as well as connected them visually to the social media post background I had created.
I liked the idea that a fan could buy the design or piece representing the part of the album they connected with most. So, designed the hats and stickers to allow a fan to do so. Doing this also adds a "collectability" feel to the pieces, making fans potentially more inclined to buy more than one or even all of them. This of course in turn would help increase sales.
Each background of the social media post was hand painted and then drawn on with a ballpoint pen. Each page represents a phase of desire and has a string glued into it that connects it like a through line leading to the heart, as all desire and love does. Each page has two song names from the album on it in a romantic cursive typeface (Anthenista) to help keep with the theme and feel of each post. I imagine each would be posted in sequential order over a month or two periods to bring excitement to what will be on the album.