SECRET 7 - BRIEF - VISUAL RESEARCH

Visual research - used to as a guide for styling my interpretation of Castles Made of Sand. 

I explored the many different covers that Hendrix has used over the years, this helped me to understand how I should approach designing the cover for the song. 

• Rich with vibrant colours - Hendrix comes from the beginnings of psychedelic rock, which uses many trippy and "out of this world" type visuals. Throughout his artwork, you can see a great use of bold and striking colours which are representative of that rock movement and I think it is very important to include this in my designs.
• Texture - a lot of the covers from the 60s have great added texture either because of the medium in which the artwork was created or because of the age of the sleeve design. This will be an important asset to the cover design. 
• All of his covers include portraits of him mostly taken by Karl Ferris - he was a designer and photographer of album covers at the time his work lends itself to the psychedelic rock scene. A lot of his work which can be seen below uses and takes a lot of influence from the psychedelic scene. 

Karl Ferris - Photography*

The 60s Record Sleeves 

• The 60s was a great time for music as this is when people really started to find the individuality through both the music and visually (record sleeves). It is interesting to see how the record covers from this era have been created as they wouldn't be much different to now. 
• A lot of the design is very bold and there is a lot of colour involved which I feel this is something that has to be very prominent in my design for Hendrix. As the design is for S7 it means using type for the name etc is not allowed so I feel that though the type is important it is also just as important to represent the song as visually as possible without it. 

Song meaning visuals - After having looked into the song in some depth and think about what it meant to Hendrix and what he was trying to say within the song I thought about how I could visually represent what he was saying. As the design is an interpretation of the song I want my design to be ambiguous as possible having to make the audience think properly about what the song means.   

• The song is a symbol for the course of change in life. Things in our life have to end at some point good or bad. 
• Things come and go - the sea in the song is representing time ticking by
• The castles are memories or events that have been washed away by the infinite continuation of time (sea). 
• "All good things much come to an end"
• "Nothing will last forever" 
• As psychedelic rock is a very spiritual thing and you can start to make links between psychedelic rock and religions such as Hinduism which has already been done by Hendrix himself (Axis: Bold as Love cover) which shows him stood next to their God Vishnu. 
• Making that link with Hinduism then brought me on to flowers but in particular, the lotus flower - Many of the gods and goddesses of Hinduism are linked to the flower, for example, the goddess of prosperity, Laxmi, is usually depicted as being seated atop a fully opened lotus flower. Likewise, Brahma, the god of creation is depicted as emerging from a lotus that crawls from the Naval of the sustainer Lord Vishnu. 
• In this case, a flower is the perfect visual representation of something beautiful that has to come to an end. The flower has a short lifespan and eventually has to die yet when it is dead we can still remember the good things about it and the joy that came along with it.