A. Spencer album artwork
Twice in 2017 I had the pleasure of designing some album art for songwriter A. Spencer — each time for a digital-only EP.
For the first, February's A Secret Spell, we let this striking George Boorujy painting do most of the work, pairing it with some fairly restrained type:
Then, later in the year, I created the artwork for a new set of songs called Cicatriz that beautifully captures the weariness and dread of 2017.
Part of the lyrical inspiration for the title song, as described to me by the songwriter, was last year’s series of shocking and momentous voting results—in Britain, here in the U.S., and in Colombia. (In his words, it felt like "the idea of democracy was quite literally coming apart at the seams all over the place.") So my concept for the cover art was to allude to the impact of those moments by filling the space entirely with giant type, like a vintage newspaper headline.
The letterforms on the cover are based on a particular style of condensed type in this vein, but I drew them from scratch so I could get it all to lock up exactly how I wanted, by controlling the width and stroke weight more precisely. It was then printed and “roughened” manually (using a photocopier and physical manipulation of the paper) before being colored digitally—the uncomfortable color combination feeling to me like a sort of funhouse version of the news.
The lyrics and credits carry the concept to its logical conclusion: They’re printed as newspaper stories, in narrow justified columns.
I enjoy the way the artwork for these two EPs function as a sort of inversion of each other: Where A Secret Spell was dominated by a huge, relatively monotone image, Cicatriz is nothing but type and color.
