TBD: Run It Back!

To Be Determined are an invite-only internet music collective run in part by my friend Jish, whom I approached when she expressed need for a cover artist for this compilation. “TBD: Run It Back!”, their fifteenth compilation, is a collection of remixes of songs from earlier compilations.

Design requirements:

• Prominently include the name of the compilation
• Incorporate the theme of the event (using arrows, swooshes, cycles, etc)
• Include “015” in the bottom-right corner to indicate this as the 15th compilation

Process

I created this graphic using Affinity Designer. The central arrow is the main motif of course; it was designed in place with the gap in the middle from the get-go, and the lettering was cut out from that. The lettering is slightly above the centerline - this makes the little notch in the middle of the “B” visible, which improves legibility just enough to stop it from being confused with an O. It also prevents an awkward “island” from appearing in between the gap and the crossbar of the capital A.

The whole motif is cloned and repeated several times over at varying opacity levels for a faux-3D effect.

I incorporated the TBD logo into the backdrop - and the barcode at the bottom also reads “To Be Determined”.

The original version of the image that I created used a pink-and-white colour scheme. With my agreement, Jish played around with the design’s colours and made a number of alternate versions, eventually landing on the dark green that was used in the final design.

The final cover art as used in the compilation. Available on Soundcloud.

Reflections

My main takeaway from making this piece is that text can be hard to wrangle! Human perception doesn’t always care for geometric perfection, and sometimes it’s necessary to break some other rules in order to get things to look right.