Album Art Case Study: "Trance State Disasters"

The album art for my sound project, Neon Bubblegum, Trance State Disasters like much of my illustration and design work, took shape after various rapid iterations. The process I used to arrive at the final album art is often times the same, with tweaks along the way depending on the project.

To begin, I spent a chunk of time simply sketching ideas in a notebook as I was working on the music. These thumbnails would often represent certain thematic ideas I was working through in both the music and the illustration. In the case of Trance State Disasters it was growing up in the 1980’s surrounded by video arcades and sprawling multiplexes.

I like to sketch in legal pads or cheap notebooks. Over the years I’ve found this works better than using expensive, heavy weight sketchbooks. At this stage I’m simply wanting to get ideas down on paper.

Thumbnail sketches of album cover ideas.

Thumbnail sketches of album cover ideas.

I knew that I wanted some sort of arcade machine at the center of the album art, and, in the early days of the album’s recording and mixing process, I had created a blue dog named Bad Bongo. There was a track on the album that eluded to Bad Bongo, which is why I had pictured him holding the coin, about to play the machine.

Early color version of the album art.

Eventually, I removed Bad Bongo wanting the focus to be on the arcade machine itself and the alien landscape it was surrounded by. The music I was creating was influenced by 1970’s German space rock called Komische, and the visuals were getting closer to reflecting those sound experiments.

A later version of the album art.

At the same time I was iterating on the Neon Bubblegum logo. I wanted it to have a retro sci-fi feel and took inspiration from the logo design of the science magazine, OMNI.

Various iterations of the Neon Bubblegum logo design.

Final album art with brush work, color adjustments and photomontage elements.

In later iterations, I added an element of photomontage with the piano on fire that is displayed on the screen of the arcade machine. This was not planned, it was a last minute experiment to further extend the various mediums being used, and bring more absurdism into the overall design.

The color vector art was all created in Adobe Animate, and the final brush work was done in Adobe Photoshop, in addition to various color corrections, which is a typical production pipeline that I employ.

Trance State Disasters final album art.

In the final version, the band logo and name of the album are added with a bit of neon framing, another last minute addition to the layout.