Madonna | Ray of Light - Expanded Box Set

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Madonna - Ray of Light (Expanded Box Set)
MUSIC PACKAGING CONCEPT ART & DESIGN : NOVEMBER 2021 - JANUARY 2022

"... despite its sunny title the album is a voyage into the darkness and terror of grief. Like Dark Side of the Moon, it is an elegiac study of ego, mental disintegration and the fear of death. Pink Floyd’s epic drew on ‘70s psychoanalysis, R. D. Laing and the divided self, while Ray of Light captures the 90s zeitgeist with its references to Kabbalah and the subconscious. Dark Side uses the sun and moon as symbols of life and death, while Ray of Light revolves around the duality of sea and sky. Both albums require the listener to go the whole journey to get the full effect." - Lucy O'Brien for TheQuietus.com

"Madonna played a large role in reopening mainstream American music to the club sounds of Europe in ways that have reverberated since. You can hear Ray of Light in artists as disparate as Britney, who worked with Orbit years after Madonna on “Alien,” to the adventurous producer and vocalist Grimes, who called Ray of Light a “masterpiece.” [It is important] to reveal something serious about yourself and the world through your work if you are a pop artist, and much of this can be traced back to Ray of Light." - Pitchfork.com

"Rooted in the underground yet heard and loved by millions, it’s the multi-platinum antecedent to today’s popular EDM, but considerably more personal. Twenty years later, singers and producers alike are still chasing its finely finessed fusion of anguished rumination and beat-driven bliss." - Rolling Stone

Ray of Light is Madonna's seventh studio album, an electronic/techno blend of cutting-edge sounds incorporating ambient, trip hop, psychedelic and Middle Eastern music styles. Produced by Madonna, William Orbit, Patrick Leonard and Marius de Vries, the songs about motherhood, spirituality, grief and death struck a chord with listeners and is frequently regarded as perhaps the best album of her career and one of the greatest mainstream pop albums of all time. It was released in 1998, reached number one in several countries, won four Grammy Awards and sold over 16 million copies worldwide.

This is my favourite album of all time. The music has been the soundtrack of my life, and its incredible photography, elegant graphic design and beautiful holographic special edition from 1998 have all been a direct inspiration on my creative work. I've always wanted to create an expanded box set concept for this album and this project has given me the chance to experiment with photograph retouching and abstract paint animation. I had ideas and concepts in the back of my mind for a few months before sitting down and completing everything in a design sprint from 27 December 2021 to 5 January 2022.

This box set design is directly inspired by the work of Kevin Reagan, the original album artwork designer, who won the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package in 1998 for his work on Ray of Light.

Update (August 2023): I rebuilt this box set in 3D and expanded on some of the initial concepts, including more holographic box artwork, new vinyl variants, and animated examples of how the artwork came together.

The box set

The box itself is heavily inspired by the original special edition of the album, which featured a holographic cover designed to replicate the album artwork's jacket and overall water imagery, which, at the 41st Annual Grammy Awards (1998), won the award for Best Recording Package for designer Kevin Reagan.

This box set design takes the same approach and adds a new "expanded edition" logo to the cover in embossed silver. In a physical print, this would be a hologram, but digitally it can be applied as anything from animated album artwork in Apple Music to lyric videos and social content.

Once the box is opened, inside is a 2 LP liquid-filled edition of the album on vinyl, a hardcover book, six 7" singles on colooured vinyl, six lithographs, a poster, 10 CDs, a DVD, and a Blu-Ray.

The deluxe vinyl edition of Ray of Light in this box set, with newly created album artwork.

I was inspired by new technologies in record pressing. Given this album's watery imagery, it seemed appropriate to introduce the idea of a liquid-filled vinyl edition of Ray of Light, directly inspired by (and with graphic elements borrowed from) Mondo's "Aliens Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Liquid Filled) 2XLP" release. While this would be impractical and expensive for a widely-produced box set, it was still something I wanted to experiment with.

This edition preserves the artwork of the original pressing's inner sleeves and uses them as inspiration for a new silver gatefold design.

A card sleeve collection of discs will be the digital component of this release, including 10 CDs, a DVD and a Blu-Ray. The artwork aims for cohesiveness with images taken from the same photo shoot, with a circle and light burst design inspired by the original album's booklet. Across the discs, the content would include the original remastered album with bonus tracks, remix edits, live tracks, demos, and a Blu-Ray and DVD audio set that remasters the complete album experience into Dolby Atmos with digitally re-scanned music videos and live performances. All six singles (including Beautiful Stranger) are included with a CD each, featuring all official remixes on each disc, plus the remixes for promotional singles Skin and Sky Fits Heaven.

The CD singles would also be available as coloured 7" vinyl, with new label designs and their re-created original single artworks.

A hardcover book would be included. The cover mirrors the layout of the original album artwork.

The book would focus on telling the complete story of Ray of Light's creation.

Lithographs and a large poster are the final touches in this box set. The images chosen come from magazine photoshoots and music videos.

The box set with all CD, DVD, Blu-Ray and vinyl on display.

Additional content

Beyond the box set itself, this is a concept for a revamp of her online store, including some ideas for merchandise and ways to split up the different products.

This is conceived as a limited edition, online-exclusive release of the vinyl. The artwork mirrors the album artwork, but uses a still image from her "Frozen" music video, and with some edits to her dress and posture.

This "Frozen edition" vinyl would include midnight black liquid inside the dark blue vinyl.

A sterling silver, custom-made Ray of Light ring, available as an online exclusive (as including it in the box set would elevate the price considerably).

This hoodie design uses a still from the "Frozen" music video.

A concept for a Record Store Day limited release of the album in a "Sunset" variant, using the second photoshoot setup done by Mario Testino for the album cover. This cover image was used for the Frozen single artwork.

This edition uses oranges and caramel colours in the liquid-filled vinyl, for a warmer and sunnier variation of Ray of Light.

A very limited, signed edition of the box set.

Behind the scenes

This project began with research into the album's original strong, clear art direction. I looked at many reference images and my own copies of the album on CD and vinyl. Over the years, Ray of Light's re-pressings have skewed the colours in more red or green tones, so it was important to find the original editions and use them as my guides. The original artwork's use of star/sun symbols and thin white circle lines was carried across my box set design.

Researching what Madonna's peers have produced in box sets, it was very quickly obvious that not a lot of investment is made into music box sets by women. Many of the best box sets produced are by men and/or bands, and I am indebted to SuperDeluxeEdition.com for the hours of entertainment and incredible writing I found during my explorations.

Many of my reference points came from well outside of pop music, or the music industry in general. Some of my favourites (including those shown here) were produced by/for Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Danny Elfman, Charlie Chaplin, Elton John, Paul McCartney and George Michael. In Asia, K-Pop artists including BTS and Blackpink frequently release colourful, fun box sets at affordable prices for fans.

The indie record label Mondo has always been an inspiration for me and for Ray of Light I was directly inspired by their pressing of the Aliens soundtrack on liquid-filled vinyl. Their expansive reissues of soundtracks (including the Batman Animated Series Volume 1 collection shown here) are collated with a strong eye toward a cohesive, appropriate design, and I was inspired to follow that approach with my work.

To begin re-building the album artwork from scratch, I chose Pantone 2234C as my primary colour. It was a close approximation of the original album artwork's overarching colour, and allowed me to keep everything looking cohesive across different artwork files and software applications.

The next step was re-creating the album's logo with a newly-drawn icon and using the original album's font, with some small adjustments to the kerning. For the box set's cover, I wanted the "expanded edition" logo to interfere with the original as little as possible. The final result incorporates the thin circle from the original CD's booklet artwork.

This video shows how the album artwork was recreated for this project. Mario Testino's 1997 untouched photoshoot for the album cover has long been available online via fan forums and social media groups. Given their age, the majority of available finished photos are scans, many of which are incorrectly coloured or preserved. To create the cleanest, highest-quality photographs for this project, I started with the untouched images and worked on editing them to resemble their finished versions.

For the album cover, the original photo needed to be cropped of its photo negative frame first, retouched, and expanded. The original album cover has a stretched quality to the background that I wanted to avoid for this version. The new artwork incorporates more green tones than white, and the light reflections taper off towards the side.

As a large number of original un-retouched photos are available from Mario Testino's photo shoot, I used 12 of them as the artworks for the CD sleeves. Each photo was cropped, retouched, expanded (with the help of Adobe Firefly and Photoshop's beta AI generation abilities) and the circle / ray of light graphics were added. The light travels from the left to the right side of the image across the covers, to create a subtle connecting flow between them.

Ray of Light was promoted with five singles, and the following year, the 1999 Grammy Award-winning Beautiful Stranger (from the film 'Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me') was also released. I thought it was best to include this single in this box set, given its writers/producers were still Madonna and William Orbit.

The original single artworks are not available in high-resolution online given their age. Rather than use scans of varying quality levels for this project, I re-created each single cover from scratch. This involved tracking down high-resolution photography, their original fonts, and re-drawing graphics to match the sources.

Each single recreation posed its own unique design challenges. For example, the Beautiful Stranger cover used a screencap from the original NTSC master of the music video, however it was stretched and skewed in a way that distorted her face. I used an HD remaster of the video for the new single, and only when I was laying it out did I notice the original cover designer had digitally removed her left bra strap so the black text would be visible against her skin - a small detail I had never noticed until I started working on this project.

The original version of this box set artwork was created in 2D, with the graphics applied to mockups in Photoshop for their final presentation. For this new version, translating these graphics to 3D posed many new challenges. Over 150 graphics had to be created as UV skins for all of the 3D objects, including CDs, vinyls, boxes and individual sleeves and cases, as well as custom objects like the silver ring. This is an example of just some of the UV graphics created.