False Advertising - Brainfreeze
Album campaign art direction and designMusic for me has always been both about what you hear and what you see.
I first got into graphic design by making fan websites for bands when I was a teenager, since then I've been lucky enough to continue to design plenty of visual things to help people experience music throughout my design career.
In more recent years, playing in my own band has put me on both sides of this. Writing songs, recording them and then also creating the artwork and videos has been a huge part of what I’ve done for the last five years as a member of False Advertising. For the first few years the band existed as an entirely DIY entity, and developed an un-fussy chaotic visual style that reflected their self-recorded, loud, chaotic music. This was partially formed by necessity as an unsigned band working on a shoestring budget.
However as time went on, the songs we were writing became more expansive and ambitious. We went into a studio in 2018 to record for the first time with producer Luke Pickering, we were awarded PRS Momentum Funding for the release of the album, which presented us with many more options for it’s release than we ever could have previously dreamed of. We also found and began working with our manager Matt Hughes around that time too.
I decided early on in the process of making the album that to hold-true to our DIY roots the band should be responsible for the album’s visual side. My aim was that the concept, name and visual identity would come from us and closely link to the music. Once we had developed a solid visual direction, then we would look to collaborate with other people to help us extend and realise our vision.
Ideation
The first task was to find a thematic hook that could be used to represent the album, which could inform both the name and the visual concept. The band has two lyric-writers and singers, so some work needed to be done to get to grips with how the two viewpoints are heard across the album.
After analysing the album lyrically, my interpretation was that each song is commenting in a different way about self-indulgence, be-it commenting on someone acting self-indulgently, or the narrator acting in that way towards someone or a situation.
‘Self indulgence’ wasn’t a name that we liked, but as a theme it did inspire several potential names and visual ideas.
Moodboarding
I collected a bunch of visual references which I felt were in-line with the themes I had identified.
I then combined some of these visual ideas with potential names, sometimes randomly, sometimes with a bit more of an agenda.
Alongside the others in the band, we picked our favourite visual idea which was a dropped melting ice cream. We felt that this reflected the feeling of something that you’re looking forward being spoiled, and suggested the idea of self-indulgence in a more direct way by being sweet and gluttonous.
The ice cream idea also tied in to the ‘sweet’ theme of the artwork for our previous single ‘You Said’ which featured an exploding bottle rocket. This also then inspired the idea of creating a series of imagery depicting ‘sweet things being destroyed’ which would be used for the other artwork that we needed across the campaign. We came up with a number of ideas for this, including melting a lollipop with a blow-torch, setting marshmallows on fire and melting candy-floss with water.
This was then developed further with a bunch more experimentation with visual style, test photography, composition, type and layouts, to get a feel for how a final version would look and feel.
