Music Packaging Design
Soichi Terada – Sounds From The Far East
The design is inspired by contemporary Japanese graphic design and Tokyo's aesthetic.
This work was part of a module called Music Packaging (TY3PD), which delves into the industry of package design, focussing primarily on the design and making of physical and digital packaging. The aim of this projects is to create a re-issue of a previously released album. We were given a choice of four albums, with an alternative offer too, allowing you to choose your own artist/album, based on the fact the artist/album wasn’t over popularised and the album design was very basic or amateur.
We were asked to produce four forms of deliverables for this module. The first was the physical packaging, which could be any format of personal preference (e.g. vinyl, CD, cassette). Second, was the presentation of our product in the digital environment online (e.g. streaming service and marketplaces). The third was an additional deliverable to go along with the physical packaging. This could be anything from a promotional video, to a poster, or stickers, as long as the deliverable demonstrates transferred design style from the main packaging design. Then fourth an finally, to produce a reflective report analysing your research, development, experimentation, choices, and overall design process.
The album I chose to re-design was a choice of my own. Soichi Terada’s – Sounds From The Far East. This is an electronic deep house album featuring 12 tracks, published by record label Rush Hour Recordings. The album genre is predominantly electronic, dance and deep house, but is heavily influenced by the Japanese movement surrounding these genres. This blend of genre is formed because of Terada’s cultural background, being from Tokyo, Japan, as well as his interest and love of both Western house music and Japanese chiptune, and native music. The album is a compilation of tracks produced by Soichi Terada, published and released in February 2015.
The reason I chose this particular album was because of my own interest in electronic music. I believe the wide genre offers a lot of variety not only in terms of genre but in terms of design. Some of the most creative, original and contemporary design created at the minute is done for the music industry and related to this genre. I also thought the style of Japanese design would be something interesting to incorporate in my design as this is something I admire but have never tried to do myself. So I saw this as a bit of a challenge too. Making the physical product also proved to be a very challenging part of the creation. Having to tile the product by paper and then place onto coloured card, whilst scoring the pieces in the precise places, to then be stuck together intricately. This all because of the lack of printing resources available and having to resort to a hand-made result, which did turn out to be very smartly done.
