My illustration for the first synesthetic, collaborative, and interactive cover of The New Yorker magazine music issue out June 5, 2023
I don’t play an instrument, but I love music, especially its rhythms, which often inspire me. And when I design, I try to harmonize the various visual shapes as if they were part of a musical composition.
I don’t play an instrument, but I love music, especially its rhythms, which often inspire me. And when I design, I try to harmonize the various visual shapes as if they were part of a musical composition.
The cover was marvelously animated and recorded by the magazine's team with the aural elements making up the cover’s melody. This multimedia project was programmed by David Kofahl. Experience an interactive cover with a multitude of elements and sounds, and read the story when you visit the magazine website.
The search process and draft versions
In my process I created two main variants. The point of the first one (with a dancing girl) was to show how music shapes your body, and how your body and mind can react to it. The second one showed the diverse elements as musical styles coming together in a great mix of «sounds», shaping the surrounding space like a beautiful and ugly parallel reality.
The more abstract approach was chosen by the art editor and the team, and I focused on rhythm and arranging elements on the cover by playing with the differences in shape and scale. I worked with high-resolution raster images (the originals were made by hand, the technique is a kind of monotype printing). It was a lot of fun moving and scaling shapes in reaching different sounds of the cover: gentle and sharp, noisy and loud. I imagined the timbres of bells and the wind and the different sounds of musical instruments and voices like the bass drum, violin, tambourine, piccolo, piano, horn, the trombone, and human voices, including talking, singing, laughing, screaming, and shouting were included as parts of my abstract collage for the cover.
Thank you!
