The band I chose to research and create an info-graphic on is the band The Cinematics. I hadn’t heard of them before this project, but their music appealed to me on my first listening to it and had a similar vibe and style as some other bands that I listen too. Despite them breaking up in the summer, they were a very successful band based in Glasgow. The Cinematics had two successful albums, which is where I focused my research for my info-graphic.
I collected a large variety of album and single cover images by the band and analysed them in my sketchbook. The lack of colour was evident in all of them, with only black, red and white used; I took this into consideration when I created my info-graphic. Their use of typography appealed to me too, with the album/single title contrasting with the appearance of the band name and different and unique to each song or album. The use of photography interested me too due to the strange imagery such as a typewriter on fire, which could perhaps have a hidden meaning or message.
When I started to research the lyrics for each song on each album, I was both interested and quite confused with what I found. Some phrases made sense to me straight away: for example “are we staring at the same stars?”, however some phrases such as “is there a miracle drug that I can get?” contain more depth to them. Overall, The Cinematics lyrics are based on personal thoughts and experiences and offer advice and strong opinions for example “city life is a lie.” I found their lyrics very clever and thought provoking.
I focused my research further, onto the repetition of certain lyrics in the band’s songs that help to convey and emphasise a certain message or enlighten the specific song title. I analysed all of the songs in the two albums “A Strange Education” and “Love and Terror”, and noted which phrases were repeated and how many times depending on each individual song. This gave me a great variety of data ranging from repetition from as high as sixteen to as low as two.
I created several icons for my info-graphic based on the content of the specific repeated lyric, and arraigned them on my info-graphic depending on how many times the specific lyric was repeated.
I kept my colour scheme relevant to the appearance of The Cinematic’s music covers, in order for it to be recognisable as part of the band’s appearance and approach. I chose a condensed typeface for my info-graphic keys as this style of type is used in the majority of their music covers. I chose ‘Gill Sans MT Condensed’ as it appears almost gothic and I felt it fitted with the colour scheme well due to the use of black and red. I used uppercase letters for the info-graphic subject and album cover titles as this feature is used in The Cinematic’s music artwork. I felt it also helped create information hierarchy along with the increased font size, due to the use of lower case letters used in the info-graphic keys.
This design really shows the style of The Cinematics album cover, I like how you have picked fonts that suit the band and how you have used the same colour scheme to emphasise their style and it goes with their music videos as well which are really dark. The white and red also makes the font very clear and by making your graph bigger makes is the main thing you look at first and draws you in as you want to find out what its about and then the keys make you understand it. The layout of it is also good as you are showing a lot of data and the layout stops the design from being confusing.
ReplyDeleteJudging by the album cover you have shown you have really captured the style of the band in your info graphic. I love your symbols, they work well when put together with the line that is repeated making it very clear. The way you have separated the two albums works very well which adds to the clarity. The use of hierarchy is executed very very well here. The only thing that I can think of suggesting is to try and make it perfectly clear to the viewer that you are counting certain phrases that are being repeated, e.g. maybe include a small heading stating so. This was just a thought and might not actually be essential.
ReplyDeleteThe have obviously thought long and hard about the design. Both the typography and the colour scheme convey the style of the band very well and make the info graphic seem quite gothic.
ReplyDeleteALthough looking at the album cover you poster a lot more white has been used, creating contrast between black and white, with limited use of red.
You have obviously used more red than white and I think this makes the info graphic seem much more 'dense' whereas the use of white in the album cover makes it seem quite light, while still keeping to the gothic style.
I think if you were to use white rather than red for the icons your design would also seem 'lighter'.
You have obviously put a lot of thought and effort into creating the icons and they are all fairly easy to understand, although more detail in a few of them would help.
Your poster really communicates the bands style well, your wee symbols are well illustrated and are relevant to the lyrics you are talking about. The colour scheme you have chosen is quite dark which again follows their style. Your choice of font seems to completely match the cinematics album cover, i also like how you have used white instead of red for the words, makes it very clear and makes it stand out against the black background.
ReplyDeleteJudging by the style of the album artwork you showed in your rationale, you have taken clear influence from this in your design. The font choice is the same as the font used in the artwork and the lose kerning and neat alignment of text has been carefully considered.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of heirarchy, for me it wasnt too clear that the information was about song lyrics, even though youve stated this in your design (maybe make it bigger or directly above the charts?)
Also, maybe you were aiming fro a really simple 2 colour design, but I think maybe dark grey and red might have worked better?
Overall though I really like this info-graphic and it clearly shows youve put time into researching something unique about the band and displayed it well in a style thats clear to the viewer.
nice one :)
Hey Jess,
ReplyDeleteVisually the design is really straight to the point and effective in terms of simplicity.
I love the fact that you used recognizable icons repeatedly to emphasize the number of repeated lyrics.This was easy to understand.
Even the font works.I think you captured the style intended.I could easily see the similarity.
Overall,I think you put alot of thought into the representation of the information which is good.This was a clever approach.
Nice work