Circus of Sound
Circus of Sound is an avant-garde project to bring new music to young people, based on the works of contempory performers, as well as a mix of rediscovered composers from previous centuries. The project was to create an in-house typographic style and a series of typograms for a variety of artists.
This project was about applying an appropriate typographic style, that would be suitable for a broad range of musicians. I started my project in the usual way, researching each of the artists in an attempt to get a better understanding of them. I very rarely listen to instrumental only music, particularly of the classic variety, and therefore found all the works and listened to them to see if that would help formulate any ideas. The artists for the project were:
- Astor Piazzolla (1921-92)
- William Byrd (1543-1623)
- Gyorgy Ligetti (1923-)
- Somei Satoh (1947-)
- Talvin Singh (1970-)
- Moses Taiwa Molelekwa (1973-2001)
- Canlon Nancarrow (1912-2001)
- Howard Skempton (1947-)
- John Dowland (1563-1626)
- John Cage (1912-1992)
- Charles Ives (1874-1954)
- Ivana Ognjanovic (1971-)
The music in question ranged from music from the renassiance by William Byrd, performed on instruments such as a Lute to the talba playing Talvin Singh who created an innovative fusion of Indian Classical Music and drum and bass.
As there were such a variety of styles I decided to really focus in on the word Circus. It may have been a slight cliche but the composers could be a variety of the circus animals, and the circus and tent a representation of the 'Circus of Sound' grouping of these particular arists. I researched old fashioned circus posters, found a template for the CD that could be made by folding and gluing, and not relying on plastic casing, something that would not have been in keeping with the majority of the times from the composers.
I choose a typeface called Communist for the front cover of the C.D's - it was sans-serif and easy to read and when I reduced the kerning so that the letters were all touching together (but not too merged together) this gave a space within the composition name to insert the name of the composer. For the rest of the text I used a font called Averia Serif. It wads traditional without being anquiated, and seemed in keeping with the theme from the old circus posters. The 'Circus of Sound' tag was created using a type appropriatly called Circus. I wanted the composers all the link together but be visually clear that they were seperate, so I kept the design of each CD the same and simply changed the colour, making sure their were bright and alluring.
The C.Ds were all to be displayed in a circus tent CD holder that could be rotated around with each c.d's - thus bringing them together in a "Circus of Sound".
