Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Album Cover

•

A Modern rendition of Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album cover

-Limited to using minimal colors, type variation, and font size-

-Used Baskerville regular, bold, italics-

-2017 Typography Project-

Inspiration:

I was first introduced to this song by my father in my car rides with him during my early childhood. My father, who does not speak English fluently because he was born and raised in South Korea, has always listened to CDs with American and British musicians such as Queen, Simon and Garfunkel, and Elton John. Through this early exposure to these classical and soft rock genre, I grew fond of late 1960s and early 1970s American and British music rather than Korean pop or ballad music. By the time I was in kindergarten, I knew the song by heart and always sang along to these songs without even understanding the lyrics or knowing the singer or title. After listening to some of the songs in the album as a middle schooler, I searched for his other famous songs and fell in love with Your Song and Tiny Dancer that I still enjoy listening to till this day.

Even though this song quickly became one of my favorite songs without my knowledge in English, I was touched even more from learning the message behind the song. Bernie Taupin explained that he wrote this song in his phase of wanting to go back to his roots. The Yellow Brick Road is an idea taken from the book and movie “Wizard of Oz,” in which the main characters, who are searching for something that will fulfill their needs, go on a journey to follow the yellow brick road only to learn that they had what they were looking for all along. This metaphor is used as the main concept of the lyrics, because it talks about the returning back to the simple life in the rural after experiencing the life of wealth in the city. The lyrics are very relatable to my life, because recently I have been feeling the desire to go back to the simpler times in my life. As I grew up, I began struggling with stress, materialistic values, and ignorance. I’m constantly worried about my future in terms of economic stability and work towards ideals that other people say I need. Therefore, the Yellow Brick Road in my life represents the society’s path of norm in achieving “success.” Similarly, Taupin’s hopes to turn back to the basics relates to my wish to abandon the conventional path of success for my desire to return to the times of simplicity and carefreeness that I experienced as a child.

Font Choice:

Baskerville - To maintain the antique, nostalgic mood of the song, I decided to use Baskerville. With its high contrast between thick and thin strokes, I am able to fill up the space of the cover without any images.