Illustrator Burak Şentürk shared three-album cover designs with Mercado readers, which inspired him recently.
Album: Beach House / 7
Design: Post Typography
"We see a collage work designed by Post Typography for one of the band's darkest albums, "7," on the cover. Besides its fractal structure and giving a retro-punk feel, the black and white design opens a window to a new perspective with hologram details, and I believe this approach is a parallel narrative to the Beach House sound."
Beach House, founded by Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, wanted a design that reflected the song's themes to match the dark and dystopian feel of their 2018 album "7". Post Typography's punk-style collage highlights the cinematic feel of the work by interrupting a fragmented female portrait with shimmering foil cuts. Various colors of the rainbow flash as the light changes on the album cover, intended to create a rich experience for the audience to discover something new every time they look at it. This feature makes the album cover a unique object that fans enjoy keeping on their shelves.
Post Typography is a Baltimore, NYC, and Atlanta-based creative agency that creates print, digital, and conceptually assertive work. Founded in 2007 by Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen, Post Typography's work is featured in many locations, from museums to theaters, from book covers to bars.
Album: Tame Impala / Currents
Design: Robert Beatty
"Artist Robert Beatty, a musician who has designed many album covers, worked on the cover with an airbrush (paint gun). It is an essential factor that impresses me that it achieves a digital effect in a traditional way, which has difficulties in implementation.
The artist's design is based on a phenomenon called "Vortex Shedding". In the fluid dynamics mentioned in the phenomenon, it is noted that the eddies formed by a stream as it continues to flow around a fixed rock. In the album mix, the vocals are positioned as an instrument without being used in the foreground, giving fluidity to the sound. Since the cover artist is a musician, I can say that it was an outstanding collaboration."
The cover of Tame Impala's album, released in 2015, was designed by artist Robert Beatty. The artist's choice of not depicting familiar objects or scenes in the design leads the design to think about the album Cover as a formative experience, not as a story or setting. The pulsating lines and shapes on Beatty's cover lead us to pay attention to the interactions between the forms and trajectories of melodies, rhythms, and textures, rather than thinking about the definite meanings of the lyrics.
The production of the band's founder, Kevin Parker, also distracts us from thinking mainly about the meaning of the lyrics. The artist's vocals are processed with a high dose of echo reverb, making it difficult to pay attention to the words. When we consider the visual and auditory aspects of the album in terms of form, the connections between the creative process that underpins both are felt.
Album: Faith No More / King for a day…
Design: Eric Drooker
"The cover art was designed from a panel of the graphic novel Flood: A Novel in Pictures by artist Eric Drooker, known for his covers of The New Yorker. Black and white panels, which give the impression of being produced with the wood printing method, offer an impressive light-shadow effect. Adding red color to the original image for the album cover, which is my favorite and contains a very aggressive attitude, was a perfect choice."
Eric Drooker's illustrations and posters have a familiar image in the global street art movement. Born and raised in New York, the artist exhibited his first works on the streets of NYC. Since then, Drooker's reputation as a social critic has grown, and he has produced numerous editorial illustrations for publications and brands, including Nation, The New York Times, and Progressive.
Illustrator Burak Şentürk
He was born in Istanbul. He studied at Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Graphic Art. He started his professional career at the age of 10 by drawing and writing cartoons for humor magazines under the direction of Oğuz Aral. He has done graphic design and illustration works for many brands for agencies such as TBWA, Placenta, Imeanit, Creative, Manajans, Fine Arts, Young&Rubicam/Reklamevi, Art Group, Sistemsensin, Daniska, Medina Turgul DDB, and Benefit. Burak Şentürk, one of the two artists of Wacom International in Turkey, continues his works for international joint projects and exhibitions.