Aphex Twin: Blurred Boundaries
Packaging design and multimedia project
Packaging design and multimedia project
In my thesis year of 2010, I was asked to approach the idea of music packaging and innovation to create a product. I immediately was drawn to Aphex Twin (Richard James) and his experimentation of both digital and organic sounds and was set on playing off of this by combining new and old. The context quickly fell into a masters discography edition of all his work, and from there I created records of each of his albums, a collectors book, and a Richard James USB stick including digital copies of all included music. I find it fascinating that over the past 30 years, music formatting has evolved from records, to cassettes, to Compact Discs, to digital files, and in recent years a slight turn back to records. I decided to embrace embrace this and do a physical copy in comparison to some of the web packaging that other classmates approached.
In the end I decided a boxed collection including records of his albums, a book dedicated to the history of this work, and finally a USB stick of digital files would be best for all generations buying James' work. Below are a selection of spreads, as well as process images from the collectors book, and final box containing everything.
In the end I decided a boxed collection including records of his albums, a book dedicated to the history of this work, and finally a USB stick of digital files would be best for all generations buying James' work. Below are a selection of spreads, as well as process images from the collectors book, and final box containing everything.
I thought nothing would be more fun then to have the iconic Richard James Pose as the flash drive, so the music is literally from within. Once the music was loaded from the device I also envisioned it as a high capacity (8 or 16 gig) drive that could be used for any other file.
