Every Reason Arrives

We continue to embrace small projects for recording artists because they carry the same components as a branding exercise for a corporate client. It also means we get to keep our soul.

For Devin, we wanted to get away from the standard rock star poses, cliché ‘tough guy’ stance or pensive brooding musician thing. Devin’s record had a fresh and energetic sound, his is not a dark or dissonant form of rock, it’s a celebration of his faith set to arena rock volume. We also found in reviewing his lyricism that the entire record operated on emotion, with very few narrative lines, or figurative object references in the material. Robbed of any simple cues to derive an aesthetic, we decided to embrace the fluidity of context, to strip away everything but Devin, and the exuberant energy of his album.
Thus: we scheduled a photo shoot.
Then we spent 3 and a half hours bouncing Mr. Garza around on a trampoline.

We shot him in the dark, with a flash, allowing us to ‘freeze’ him mid-flight (though we were after a Michael Muller for X-Men thing, we never got there). Devin was a total hero. If you’re unsure how it might feel to be shot this way, try diving on your bed or couch a few times with your eyes closed.

The shots provided a great starting point. The client selected helped us select shots to base our illustrations on. But we still felt like the bouncing, floating Devin was interesting, it lacked the dynamic range appropriate to the album. While we’ve made many different things from barcodes, we’ve never just let the barcode be the package. Here, we did. Devin, in flux, becomes the breaking point between a past of chaos, and a future of harmony. We injected little slivers of color into the breaks in the barcode, and destroyed it behind him. Barcode as device, datum, unifying gesture, motion, light energy. It’s getting harder each time to reinvent these barcodes. Who knows how far we’ll have to go on the next one.

[detail of the fragmented area]

Clean monospaced type treatment.

For the booklet inside, a headshot was chosen from the shoot, illustrated, and filled with the barcode lines. If the linear gesture is a metaphor on the cover for re-birth, then filling him with those lines on the inside of the booklet is a metaphor for the peace and harmony he now carries inside.

Every Lyric.

“Every Reason” was produced and co-written by Cary Pierce of Jackopierce fame. He owns ForEverything Records in Dallas.

Design Team: Creative Director and illustrator, Jett Butler. Photography, Sean Lopano, type treatment in booklet by Melissa Martin.