Music Terrae: The naming and the concept
The request was simple. A new music label was born. No name, no concept. I received it with the excitement of going back to design over the piece where designers got fun for decades: A Vinyl record cover.
For a few weeks, and after many conversations, an idea came up. Represent the origin of the music, the place where the music comes from. Music Terrae, two words in the form of a combination of English and Latin, provided the idea of an imaginary place where the music is created. A distant place is hidden from most people where. It is necessary to carry the right tool to find it: "the musiccopium". Just those with the tool (the talent) will find the path that will take them to create the most fantastic art of all.
The logo and the type
After different explorations, two ideas became potential winners. The first was a combination of cubes that used an analogy of letters engraved in stone blocks. The second is the Musiccopium. It was the guiding tool (metaphor of talent) to ensure anyone could find the land of music, the music terrae.
Why keep one image you like when you can make them work together? I decided to find different uses for these logos. The first could prevail as a logo, while the Musiccopium could work as a secondary image.
The visual concept
Based on the concept, I started working with a friend. The awesome illustrator Alina Muressan whose style was ideal, in my opinion, to represent the idea of this magic and far land. We did some research and she started to draft some combinations between a world based on the lord of the Rings and the indie and electronic music cultures so present today.
The result has been stunning since the very beginning. We wanted the covers to show stories inside this world, but instead of working on different stories for all the pieces, we decided to work on a single painting that could include all the stories at once.
It took more than four months to complete this masterpiece which served as the key element in creating the first series of ten records.
The final result: The record covers
After months of delight in seeing the progress of the illustrations, I started to work on the final music covers. The intention behind them was to make the illustrations have prominence over the other elements so they could create identity by themselves. I also intended to be clean, neat, and elegant to help the Record Label connect.
