This post was made by Abdullah Siddiqui
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Meet our artist
ELAN
We had never really discussed it, but we’d always all just assumed that Humayun would portray our artist. The name took some deliberation. We did all agree that we didn’t want to use a normal given name, because we wanted our artist to not have identifiable culture or ethnicity or religion by his name. I believe this makes an artist much more globally accessible. And I believe the labels would agree, as most artists these days use pseudonyms (Lorde, Bruno Mars, FKA twigs, everyone in hip-hop and of course Perfume Genius). For a while, me and Huzaifaa wanted to recycle an idea from our smash-hit AS project Insaficiency, and name our artist BROODS (an early idea was that Rayaan would go by the name BROODS as a recording artist, but it didn’t take). Humayun and Basil were not on board with this.
I came up with the name ELAN while watching Ellen. Yes, genius does strike in the oddest moments. I took the name Ellen and started playing around with it. My mind immediately went to Elan, both because it was a word I had recently learned, and it because it is the name of a popular clothing brand in Pakistan. I fell in love with it, because it sounded like a real artist’s name, it sounded almost like a given name, and because of its literal meaning (“energy, style and enthusiasm”). I presented it to the others, and they all immediately agreed.
We then immediately decided that the album would also be titled ELAN, and that the album cover would be our favorite shot from the music video:
I took the screen-grab from the video, and turned the contrast up to an extreme. We considered using text on the cover, but found that many artists who are indie or have a less mainstream sound opt out of using text on there covers (and this trend has begun to enter the mainstream as well, with albums like Lorde’s Melodrama, Kesha’s Rainbow and Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go). This high contrast black and white aesthetic was partly inspired by the cover of Denzel Curry’s Ta13oo:
Once we had the cover, we began on designing the rest of the Digipak. We researched Digipaks and found a few examples. We used them as a reference to create the rest of the panels of the CD package. We loved the black-and-white look of the cover, and decided to maintain it throughout the Digipak, as well as on the website.
The first thing we did was create the back side. We wanted Humayun’s appearance here to be consistent with the front, so we used another still from the music video, which we added grain, high contrast black and white and a horizontal motion blur to using Photoshop (we generally avoided using clear “posed for” pictures of Humayun in both ancillary tasks, because we found that this is usually not the case with indie or alternative artists). With research, we found that some back covers of albums with no title printed on the front have the title written vertically on the edge, so we emulated this. For the track-list, we made up names for 11 tracks, of which 4 are names of actual songs of mine (“Divide and Concur” is not one of those, but it so should be). We then added a barcode we downloaded from Google Images, as well as the logo for Denizen Records which we came up with earlier. The copyright information was based off of the template provided by the copyright information on the back of Björk’s Vulnicura, because of course it was. Here is the back cover:
We then moved onto the CD sticker. This was relatively simple. We took the same image we used for the back cover, and give it several radial blurs on photoshop, which created a beautiful circular pattern. We then copied the same copyright information from the back cover, and added “ELAN” in the Adam font (which is the same font we used for the copyright information). We then cropped it into CD shape using a template image of a CD sticker.
This left the two inside panels. For the first one, we used a still from our preliminary exercise with Humayun, switched out the background with a picture we took of some trees in my neighborhood, made it black-and-white, gave it a radial blur, and turned it upside down. We then added “ELAN” on top. For the second panel, we took the same image, and continued to radial-blur it beyond recognition, and then cropped it in the shape of a CD sticker. This created a lovely circular texture which coincided with the actual CD, and would lie right underneath it.
We also created a spine, using dimensions obtained online. We used a grey section of the back cover, added the name “ELAN” and a logo for Denizen Records.
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I will be making the next post about the second ancillary task, the website.
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