Space Song by Beach House
Poster Design
Problem
Emotions are complex and visceral, it’s hard to describe what they physically feel like and even harder to describe how they look. How can one visually describe emotions to better understand them, and help others understand theirs?
Concept
I was Inspired both by an article I read describing Space Song as “loss lingering everywhere, in soft white noise” and anxious vibrations I was feeling in my own body as I was going through a breakup. So much of the song is about the nostalgia and melancholy of a past relationship and the clarity that comes as the relationship drifts. This led me to experiment with translating my physical feelings of white noise and the feeling of white noise in the song, into a visual form.
Purpose
The purpose of this project was to translate a song drawn out of a hat, into a poster. I wanted to express more than just the lyrics or the band, rather, I wanted to show people what the song felt like physically inside of my body, how I was reacting, and how I saw myself in the song. I was pulling from my personal experience of a breakup, and I had never heard someone describe the way I was feeling. I thought that if I shared my feelings, it might make someone else down the line feel less alone.
Concept Development
I began by listening to the song and writing out what immediately came to mind, first impressions, feelings, memories, physical reactions. Then I looked at the lyrics and articles of the artist describing the song, and the band’s ethos to synthesize with my own thoughts.
click images to enlarge
Initial Sketches
Texture
From this point I honed in on exploring how white noise (as a feeling) looks on the outside. I thought about mist and clouds, but kept coming back to a sticky brayer texture that I felt looked like the feelings under my skin.
Final Design
After testing several compositions and colors, I landed on this composition and the concept of white noise didn’t make sense in color, so I returned to black and white. The back of the poster came together quickly, pulling out the quote that was the heart of the project and the rest of the text is the full article with a few key lines highlighted with a strikethrough. To me, the front of the poster illustrated the waves of white noise I was feeling within myself, within Space Song and embodied the feeling of the song more implicitly, whereas the back illustrated more of what the song way saying explicitly.