Brief 10: Secret 7

Having spent all of the Christmas holidays only working on COP3 I needed a break from it for a couple of days, so decided to spend that time working on this years Secret 7. COP3 had started to drive me a little crazy and I have begun to love designing for music so it was a welcome hiatus.

I looked on the secret 7 website to see the songs they were exhibiting this year and the options were as follows:

• The Chemical Brothers - 'Let Forever Be'
• Diana Ross and the Supremes - 'Reflections'
• The Maccabees - 'Go'
• Peter Gabriel - 'Sledgehammer'
• The Rolling Stones - 'Dead Flowers'
• St Vincent - 'Digital Witness'
• Underworld - 'Born Slippy (Nuxx)'

My decision was easy - I chose 'Reflections' by Diana Ross and the Supremes, a song that I like and an artist I respect.

I listened to the song again with a different perspective, trying to pick out key elements to it that could be effectively visually translated.

Something that jumped out to me was the tambourines used in the song, one for each singer consistently being played through out the song. I initially chose to use this as a starting point and create some digital illustrations based around this idea.

I found an image of a tambourine to use as a base for the image.

I wanted to incorporate some illustrative elements that would soften the image and perhaps make it appear more feminine, so I used the pen tool to create an image that would fall into this shape, rather than having the shape dictate the illustration.

Overall, this illustration did appear feminine in the way I wanted it to, and would now allow me to experiment with colours that would be more varied than otherwise.

After spending more time looking at the image it had started to look like a floral hair wreath more than a tambourine. While this wasn't particularly a bad thing, I felt that it made the image more reminiscent of a different era and genre than that of Diana Ross and the Supremes.

I decided to go down a slightly different path with it, still hoping to keep a similar illustrative element to it.

I looked at some images of Diana Ross and the Supremes and found that the hair style of each member was very distinct and memorable. I thought about how I could use that and concluded to outline the hair lines, and then filling those with the same visuals I had used for the tambourine.

While I really liked the initial look of the shapes, the same pattern as previously used was just having the same effect, giving the image more of a psychedelic, hippyish vibe.

I chose to keep the silhouette shape as an option for submission that I could potentially work on more, but for now, I went back to the tambourines idea, this time with a different perspective on it, making more of an attempt to modernise the visuals than feminise them.

In an attempt to modernise the otherwise basic image, I incorporated only angular lines, in a way that had previously made things look almost mechanical.

I concluded that it would probably work well if these images were in a group of three, given that the group features three members, each playing one tambourine throughout the song.

Below are the two that I have chosen as my final options for submission, but found that the second being slightly simpler due the order of the images, would be a better option for the song, which is in essence quite stripped back.