Since Abdullah is the one from amongst us who knows the most about music and record labels, naturally he was the driving force in the creation of our group's record label. As a result, I left the post up to him as well. He came up with the following
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The music industry is completely fueled by authenticity and verisimilitude.
I couldn’t type that with a straight face.
But that is my round-about way of saying that for the realism of our project, we are going to create a fake record label that will release our fake artist’s single, “Otherside”.
Now, of course, this isn’t much of a task, because we’re not going to create an actual record label. So there’s no seeking investors and filling executive positions and setting up headquarters and signing artists. We just get to do the fun part: choose a name and make a logo. This logo will then be featured on our artist’s album Digipak.
Firstly, we deliberated on a name. We found that most labels have one word names, like Columbia, Universal, Sony, Warner (usually followed by “Records” or “Music Group” or “Music Entertainment” etc.). So, we created a list of possible cool-sounding words, and we narrowed down from there. We went through dictionary.com and also considered some cool place and animal names. Here are some of the words we considered:
Almeda
Neon
Caracal
Apex
Verite
Cynosure
Ethos
Okapi
Angora
Mosley
Gerenuk
OzarkIndio
And finally, the name we ultimately decided to go with: DENIZEN RECORDS.
The next step was creating a logo. One of my favorite resources for icons and clip-art is flaticon.com. “Denizen” for me invokes something to do with travel and wandering, and a sense of music as a shared experience that transcends geography and culture and other arbitrary strata. But because you can’t put “music as a shared experience that transcends geography and culture and other arbitrary strata” into the search bar on flaticon.com, I just did a search for “travel, music”. I found an icon I loved:
It perfectly encompasses what Denizen Records has always stood for, all these days.
First, I made the icon black-and-white. It didn’t adapt well to black-and-white, so I had to do some color work. We thought it needed to be black-and-white, so it can be neutral enough to be used in any context; CD sticker, concert poster, corporate letterhead, as evidence in a court of law, etc.
From there, the design was simple but effective. We put a capital “D” around the icon, and added “Denizen Records” underneath. We had trouble selecting a font for the text. We trialled multiple fonts from dafont.com, like Code, Helvetica Neue, Disco Diva – they all presented aesthetic or legibility issues. We decided ultimately to go with Lemon/Milk. Here is our final logo:
These are two interchangeable variants, used depending on the context. There’s a bit of a problem worth mentioning. Due to some unfortunate technical issues, we have lost the original high-res .psd file, and we instead have only these low-res JPEGs. This isn’t insurmountable. We should be able to successfully avoid using this logo in any context where it needs to be too large or prominent (so that the resolution issues aren’t noticeable), but if we run into a situation where we need to do that, it shouldn’t be too hard to recreate the logo from scratch.
I know I said earlier that there’s no point assigning executive positions for this fake label, but also I’m CEO of Denizen Records because I said so. So, there.
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