Record label design ideas

When designing our logo, I took into consideration how the logo will appeal to audience. To understand who our ideal client is and communicate to them, make a statement to them with a strong and appealing visual mark. People remember things through their busy day that stand out and resonate with them. I aimed to therefore create a logo that does just that and gets into the mind of our core audience. Association of our logo to our record label and artist signed to this is key. I aimed to be different from our competition and looked at some of my peers work on their own logos and tried to learn something from each of them, from composition, colour, size and shape. Our logo needed to be simple, but not lack complexity in terms of ending up too minimal. I took out all the elements that confused and cluttered the logo to allow it to be clearly seen and read. When designing our logo, I also thought about pens, t-Shirts and billboards and how our logo had to be adaptable for a lot of situations. From the process of designing our record label logo I have found that great logos are all about connecting your business on a subconscious level with real people.

Psychedelic Mood Board

Within this mood board representing the genre of Psychedelia, I have included a varied range of images. I have also shown bands that come under this genre, their logos, album covers and concert photography. In addition to this I have included psychedelic art and some ideas we have started to brainstorm to include into our music video such as neon body and powder paint. This mood board will be used as a visual brainstorm and collation of ideas which we can refer back to when looking for things to include into our music video. 

Mini music video analysis-Tame Impala

"Let It Happen"-Music video

The video for Tame Impala’s “Let It Happen,” directed by David Wilson, is the year’s best example of an artistic music video. Immediately, Wilson establishes an atmosphere of deep anxiety as a man in a suit sprints through an airport to catch his plane. The camera hones in on the actor’s face, which is a mask of panic, a visceral, sweaty kind of discomfort native to air travel. The setting is dominated by grey, from the ugly carpets to the monotonous chairs to the industrial windows separating us from the freedom of the outside world. It’s a feeling of unhappy claustrophobia that’s somehow related to bodily death, which is the next theme to emerge. The man collapses with a heart attack, and my interpretation of the video is that everything that follows can be seen as the hallucinations of a dying man. The ensuing visuals, at least initially, serve to heighten the unease. The man sits on an aero plane, but doesn’t know how he got there; the man wakes up to an alarm clock in a depressing hotel, puzzled; the man plunges his face into the water and takes his pills, but he doesn’t feel better. The scene of his collapse returns and gives way to more bizarre hallucinations a talking sandwich, a plane crash that none of the other passengers seems to notice, and finally a free-fall through the sky. Only when the paddles on the airport floor fail to revive him, and he slips closer to death, does he slowly begin to accept his fate. Finally, there’s a sense of tranquility as he falls from the sky, and he realises that he’s not truly falling, but flying toward a source of light, a portal in the clouds. My guess is that the interpretation for this video came from the song title itself, “Let It Happen.” Wilson stops short of guessing what happens on the other side of the portal and is instead telling a story of acceptance, and the way the horrible anxieties that define our waking lives can slip away in an instant and that when we relent, we might find peace.

Genre research-Tame Impala

Tame Impala are an Australian psychedelic rock band founded by Kevin Parker in 2007. The group began as a home recording project for Parker, who writes, records, performs, and produces the music. Psychedelic rock is a diverse style of rock music inspired, influenced, or representative of psychedelic culture, which is centred on perception-changing hallucinogenic drugs. Neo-psychedelia is a diverse style of music that originated in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the British post-punk scene. Psychedelic pop is a pop music sub-genre in which musical characteristics associated with psychedelic music are applied to pop songs. The sound of spacy, guitar-heavy psychedelic pop has never really gone out of fashion since the Beatles brought it to the mainstream in the late '60s, along with artists like Pink Floyd and the Flaming Lips. Tame Impala appeals to a niche audience, the target demographic for the band is 17-28 (based on recent record sales). Although the band appeals to a wider age range in some areas such as the style of their music being closely linked to that of music during the 1960s, this allows the band to also receive high record sales from 40-50 year olds, that is compared to other bands under the same genre. In my opinion this is due to the bands unique style and song writing skills of Kevin Parker who is able to capture a niche audience and reach out to an age group born during the rise of 60s music.