Rhian Sheehan – A Quiet Divide album project

The brief was relatively open, simply a list of themes that Rhian felt resonated within the album. But with one overriding key theme; The album was about NOSTALGIA. Nostalgia as a concept was such a difficult thing to portray visually as it can be so personal and represent many different things to different people. So the challenge was to create a cover that could be robust, flexible and adapt to suit the listeners varied sense of nostalgia and what journey the music took them on personally.

I believed the album required some kind of changing, moving cover. The device of a Die-cut window in the cover could provide both a glimpse into the composers mind, and cross The Quiet Divide, but also give the ability to have a changeable cover. The perfect shape for this window must be the composers head, further pushing this idea of a window into his mind. The images within this window would need to strongly conjure this sense of nostalgia. Stills from found movies provided a perfect feeling of nostalgia while also adding to the scope of the project.

Once the still images were selected from the found movies the typographic approaches from this point were all structured to support the main concept. Simplicity. Minimalism. Help to convey the one key concept of Nostalgia. These typographic decisions also helped to establish a simple yet striking visual representation of this incredible aural journey. This could then be rolled out across all platforms: Vinyl, Cd & Digital. And in the modern climate of digital music, in which Rhian has millions of streams on spotify, this moving cover took on a world of its own.

The concept needed to work across a huge and varied number of applications. Having both the moving image element of the digital assets and the multiple rotating options in the print assets meant there was a lot of flexibility when rolling it out. LP - 2 x 180g White Vinyl with 2 printed inserts providing 4 different cover images. When rotated to each different angle there are 16 different possible cover variations. CD - Super jewel case with printed Die-cut slip. 6 page Booklet with 4 different cover images. When rotated, 12 different unique cover options. Digital - iTunes 12 page digital booklet. Apple music. Spotify. Moving image banners and web images for Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Youtube, Twitter & Loop.co.nz.