The intent for my design on the record sleeve for Bjork’s album Medulla was to reflect the artist, the music on the album (album concept) and the album title. When I think of Bjork the words experimental, avant-garde, surreal and imagination come to mind. This album Medulla is an example as to how experimental she can be. For the entire album she focused on human vocals stripping away almost all instruments to celebrate and showcase the power and energy of the human voice. She collaborated with different artists from around the world who use voice in different ways like classical choirs, beatboxing and throat singing.
Medulla is the Latin word for marrow. Marrow refers to not only hair, bones and inner tissues of organs like kidneys, but Bjork used it to also refer to the human body and getting to the essence of something, a spirit deep inside us all like the human soul.
To show this as a visual I thought about biology, cells from our core that we would see under a microscope and my idea of what the human soul might look like? I wanted to focus on organic forms and to avoid anything that referenced mechanical or geometric shapes. I chose to use a colour palette that suggests an imaginative dream-like state using purples and blues and the bubbles represent lightness and floating. A few changes had to be made to make some of the text readable including making the text larger by increasing the scale and darkening the image a little. The record label was brought down to the bottom next to the barcode. A line on the spine of the record sleeve was also added to divide the front and back of the album cover. Below is the draft and the final record sleeves.
Draft and Final
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