May 2018
Poster
The purpose of this project was to take a musician and listen to an album of theirs, repeatedly. Until their music formed a myriad of pictures and shapes in our heads, with the rhythm and tone of that music building a mood within us. Then to take all the ideas we had in our heads and get it out by sketching, beginning the process to designing a poster about them and their music.
The challenge was to listen to an album of John's and then represent him and that music on a poster using visuals paired with typography. I didn't imagine it would be easy when I first started listening to the album Four Walls, as it was very different from what I usually listen to. However, once I immersed myself in his sound I soon discovered my direction.
I listened to John Cage’s album Four Walls many times, over and over. As I listened I sketched out lines, patterns, shapes, swirls, and slammed my pen on the pages again and again until I ended up with dozens of sketches and ideas for how to approach the poster. From the marks I had drawn, it looked as if I was crafting a new language out of glyphs.
Resembling his sporadic rhythm of music, I developed an array of marks that formed a new visual language used to create patterns, arrangements and depth in the poster. These marks or glyphs were heavily inspired by the piano, which is a strongly prominent instrument in his music.