Folkways is an archive of music and sounds across generations. The smithsonian started the program to preserve music and life into the future. The goal of this project was to create an album cover for a selection of two folkways records. The music I selected was a duo of blues jazz and ragtime jazz. I enjoyed both songs and how much emotion was put into each one. I also thought because of the different genres there was lots of room for symbolic contrast in the design. With the songs decided I began using illustration to design the album cover. The colorful shapes illustrated onto the album cover were a play on synesthesia and being able to see the emotion in the music. The visualization of the music being bright and sharp for the ragtime contrasts with the curvilinear forms and blue colors for the blues. The final product is a colorful album cover that invites the owner of such a record to step into the past of jazz.
A large part of this project for me was spent creating a type face specifically for the album cover. I used illustrator to make the shapes and dfont to put them into one typeface creating the font Bodoni Jazz. Using the font Bodoni I made rough outlines of the font. The idea was to make sparatic and wild strokes to symbolize with how improvised Jazz really is. I loved learning about the process of creating a type face even if it was not as in depth of a study as could be done. I think the final result of the custom font helped to make the album covers design come together.