A friend of mine Alexander is a Bulgarian hip-hop artist. He just dropped his first album. He’s stage name is Cisterna. Gas truck in English. Alex needed help with his static imagery for every song from the new album on his youtube channel. After listening to all the song I had a strange idea or more of an epiphany about what I was about to do. His lyrics are like guidebook, a lesson, a wonderful collection of his life vision delivered in 6 songs. And then it stuck me – he is a teacher, a preacher.

Since I had to have a consistent visual approach to both six song I needed a uniting element, concept. Some time passed before I can see clearly what this should be. And then – the concept of the book, notebook came naturally after realizing he is some sort of a teacher of life lessons.Then I decided to express what I felt about his songs and the messages he is trying to convey in a book.

Every video is inspired by his lyrics and put into a book.

The static book design is complimented by a dynamic video, also inspired by the lyrics but serving more as a background than the main message in the book.

After we were done with the six books we then got to the CD itself. The main idea is to represent him as a dangerous vehicle – gas truck. From there I got the fire icon. The warning label – obligatory item for every gas truck. Afterwards it was is easy to come up with the CD design – a huge label with detailed description of the containing gas and what not.

I created custom typeface for his logo, CD cover and some of the song names.

Sometimes as designers we are tasked with some ordinary projects, sometimes we have the case of the gas truck on our hands. We dive knowing little to nothing of the final outcome, and most of the times we are amazed by how imagination works and where it can take us. Yes, most of the time our work is structured and based on hard and extensive research. Sometimes is just plain old crazy thoughts and inspiration from god knows where.

Hope you find this as interesting and fun as it was for me to create.

The first video I created is called Society. 

Alex took part in many prostests in Sofia. He is an active member of our society and his struggle to change our grim reality is persistant. 
Many times in the song he is talking about how people nowadays are fake, or just trying to hide behind some sort of a mask in order to continue their conformist lives. That's why I decided to put this mask in a plastic bag labeled Monday. For I understood it as we have a mask for everyday of the week, every occasion, every person. 

The song above is Called Night Move.

This in one has more simplistic design. I had some struggle to convey visually this song. What I felt is some sort of darkness and obsucirty in his relationships. That's why I went with only bold typography, symbols of night and fire, and some actual fire in background.

For my next creation I decided to go even softer. Is more of a party song as he putted. Alex is a fan of Akira Kursowa to put it mildly. 

This song is called Roads. After the whole label idea was born this one also came naturally. In Bulgaria in order to travel on highways you need a prepaid sticker. I made two. Couldn't really choose between them, and used them both :) 

The song above is called Friends. As many of us he has suffered the not so great feeling of fake friends, betrayals and dissappontment from people we concidered close, even family. For this song particulary I was struck by this weird epiphany I talked in the beginning. 

One day I was starring though the window. It was rainy and very gloomy outside. Perfect weekend for work. And then I saw a puddle. Reflecting all the trees around it. Some stones and what not. I thought - hey how about a flyer laying in a puddle. Dropped from somebody with no use of it anymore. Just like friendships somethime.

I decided to create the whole scene in 3D. The stones, leaves and dirt were made with a hi-res texture. I just added water :) And the flyer with my design. It represented in my own way friendship and its expiry date. Definitely one of my favorite videos. 

The last one I did is called Quantun Traveler. 

I was really excited about this one, since I am a space related stuff nerd. Came up with this CD as planet and asteroids gravitating around it. My brain has strange creative connections sometimes. But it came out kinda cool.

The CD cover is really plain. An informative propane gas label with logo and typography. Clean and simple. 

The typography seen throughout the project is a type face I made myself. It's not meant to be perfect or professional. Just as an experiment. I have never done this before. I do logos and stuff but with just a couple of letters. This is was a bit different and really fun part of the project. It all started with the first book.

I needed a fancy cool contemporatry font for the label on the plastic bag. I was looking on the world wide web for a professional font for a good 30 minutes. And then I decided enough is enough. I will make it myself. What's the worst that can happen?

I created most of the books using Cinema 4D as a 3D application, Arnold Renderer as the renderer obviously, Adobe Illustrator for my vectors, and Photoshop to polish the renders.