Fictional Band Branding
For my 2D class, we designed several projects around one fictional band. My band was called Zenith and is essentially a "super group" of already successful and established musicians. The three tasks were to design and create a band logo, album jacket and vinyl, and a t-shirt or other merchandise promoting awareness about a particular socio-political issue.
Zenith
Logo
The first step in this process was to research how band brand identities are created based on the genre of music or personality of the group. Because the band is made up of indie/alternative artists already at the pinnacles of their career, I wanted the logo to reflect that with a grandiose feel, which is why most of my sketches included serifs and all caps.
Logo Sketches; Graphite
Digital Logo Iterations; Adobe Illustrator
I chose my three favorite ideas and recreated them digitally. Because the word "zenith" is defined as "the time at which something is most powerful or successful," I was thinking about mountain imagery as a way to show being at an apex. This metaphor is used across the different parts of this project, but I chose the bottom left logo as my final design.
Album Jacket and Vinyl
The concept for the album was the downsides of having peaked as a musician. These were some of the rough sketches for the interior and exterior of the album jacket. I chose to move the design on the far right to Illustrator.
Album Jacket Idea 1; Graphite
Album Jacket Idea 2; Graphite
Album Jacket Idea 3; Graphite
This is the finished exterior.
Album Jacket Exterior; Adobe Illustrator
This is the finished interior.
Album Jacket Interior; Adobe Illustrator
These were the designs for the vinyl labels: reflections of the themes depicted on the outside cover of the album jacket.
Vinyl Label Designs; Adobe Illustrator
To finish off the vinyl, I painted variations of the logo on each side.
Vinyl Front and Back; Acrylic Paint
T-shirt Graphic
The t-shirt had to connect back to a socio-political issue that the band might want to spread awareness of. Because I already had lots of mountain imagery, I thought it would be pertinent to link these ideas about success to global warming and the climate crisis, a debilitating consequence of lucrative, booming industries.
The graphic I decided to move to Illustrator was the middle one, which was an iteration of the original mountains logo design. I modified it so it would have ice peaks melting with a pool of water at the bottom.
T-shirt Graphic Sketches; Graphite
I added a gray cloud with ‘CO2’ written inside peeking out between the mountains like it was in place of the sun to further clarify the message of the graphic. Because I wanted to retain the minimalist style, the lines I used are short, thick, and carefully placed in order to depict water and water drops. I applied a gradient to show that the once white snow peaks were becoming blue and melting due to global warming. The shirt I chose is dark green, which not only fits with the aesthetic of most indie rock bands, which tend to gravitate towards darker colors, but also represents environmentalism, as green is symbolic and almost synonymous for the environment.
Below are two versions of the t-shirt graphic, as well as the final printed t-shirt. I chose the design with the white outlines, as it would pop better against the dark green fabric.
T-Shirt Graphic 1; Adobe Illustrator
T-Shirt Graphic 2; Adobe Illustrator
Final T-Shirt Front
Final T-Shirt Back
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