One of the biggest challenges of creating libraries which are collaborations with artists is the development of an aesthetic that reflects their “brand” our “brand values” and go some way to telling potential users the who, what, how. That is, who is this collaborator, what is this collaboration, and how would I use it. Them, this, you.
Frank Zappa once said “talking about music is like dancing about architecture”. Well talking about sound, is one step even further down the abstraction scale. So the use of imagery is important to contextualise and set expectations. Whether that be explicit images of the kinds of projects you would use something on. All the way to the more subtle stuff. The use of fonts, colours, filters, treatments and effects.
The other thing that is vital for any given project. Its likely that more than one person will be working on it. Meaning there will be more than one creative mind who may interpret the methods used to communicate these ideas differently. Whether that be the design of the UI, the website, emails, packaging, trailers and teasers.
To add to this conundrum we also were using an external UI developer based in another part of the world where English is a second laguage. Thus sending the sharing of ideas even further down the abstract scale.
This was the first project where we used a campaign book. A central file of stuff that we were all doing, so that we could judge progress, and compare that to our own, along every step of an ever-changing, developing, evolving creative process. You’ll see in this book how the disparate departments slowly aligned on a common aesthetic. But with everyone taking inspiration from one and other. Whether that be the production work of our photo and videographic team who visited our artist on tour in Las Vegas. Or indeed our highly skilled production team engineering the software itself.
We hope this book is a helpful insight into our process, but creative processes in general and how changes in direction are not to be avoided but actually strived for. To get us to what we all wanted to emote which is a sense of spirit behind the artist, and what a spirit that is – Tina Guo.