My Process:

This project was one of my most ambitious projects yet (if not my most ambitious). I was very excited about the concept of a genre swap to round out the semester, but how could I go from something as fun and obsessive as a full One Direction overview infographic to singular genre swap? The idea of a One Direction swap did come to mind, but (a) how could I choose just one genre when they went through a few different phases, and (b) I felt the natural swap from boy band would be to a metal band, but I was afraid that was too…straightforward? I was driving home from work trying to decide what album to swap and what genre to change it to when it hit me: “Why choose? Do ‘em all!” I knew this would be a big undertaking since we only had a couple of weeks left in the semester to complete this project, but I figured I would just complete however much I could in that time and use the summer to complete whatever I couldn’t finish. While I knew it would be quite a bit of work at the eleventh hour of the semester, I was excited to try and go out with a bang. Next came the fun part: deciding the genres. I thought it would be fun to do each album as a different genre but assign the genre based on the name of that album. This is what I settled on:

• Up All Night: Heavy Metal

• Take Me Home: Country

• Midnight Memories: EDM

• Four: K-Pop

• Made in the A.M.: Meditation

I figured these genres would give me a wiiide range to work with and plenty to learn. From there, it was a lot of studying the genres’ more prominent album covers, taking note of their similar features, and carrying those characteristics into my designs.

To no one’s surprise, designing was the most difficult part. While I had a ton of inspiration laid out in front of me, it wasn’t always easy deciding how to go forward. For example, a lot of the country albums were very simple: photo of the artist on the cover with a generic condensed, serif font for the artist’s name and album title. I knew that would be to simple and boring, so I kind of came up with my own more illustrative concept: pickup truck on a wide-open road, kicking up dirt, and the tailgate covered in bumper stickers with titles from the album’s songs.

The EDM album has a bit of the opposite though in that a lot of those covers look like something out of Photoshop and not the easiest to achieve (by me, at least) in Illustrator, so I had to come up with my own variation of incorporating bright, colorful elements on a dark background and giving that sort of “rave” feeling.

The K-Pop album was a bit of an in-between in that I felt the album covers were with two simple or too much to achieve in Illustrator alone, so while I feel like a typical K-pop album might have one or two of the elements I used in mine, I tried to do a cohesive amalgamation of as many as I could.

The meditation seemed straight forward enough for me: someone doing yoga at sunset with a scenic background behind them.

The one I would say I struggled with conceptualizing the most was the metal album. A lot of those album cover are very detailed and illustrative and not my style, so I was having a hard time thinking of how to bridge the gaps between authenticity, my personal style, and what was needed on the cover to get the boyband undertones across. It wasn’t until a couple of days before the due date when my classmate, Sara Davis, was kind enough to give me a great idea that I’m very excited to implement, but I unfortunately ran out of time and wasn’t able to finish it before the project was due. I’m happy to work on that one over the summer, though, and upload it when it’s finished.

Takeaways:

I’m very proud of this project. It was an absolute blast to use One Direction as a focal point for not one but TWO projects this semester, but in very different ways. This project forced me to push myself out of my comfort zone in five different ways and learn about genre patters from a whole variety of music.

I still have yet to finish the design for the first album, “Up All Night,” as I ran out of time before the assignment was due, but once I have it completed, I will upload it here!