Genesis is undoubtedly one of the greatest bands ever, and happens to be a favorite of mine. So when our instructor at FIDM asked us to remake an album of our choosing I knew I'd be going with Turn It On Again. Our instructor, Kevin Reagan was an incredible album designer who has won multiple Emmy Awards for his work. He pushed everyone hard to do great work and demanded a professional-quality product.

We started off the project by researching visual concepts that would align with the album, and created multiple album cover options that would set the tone of the full album build. Immediately my mind went to some kind of abstract retro-science fiction theme. I thought that would align really well with Genesis's signature synth pop sound, and several sub-concepts were baked into that. You can see that theme in several of the covers below that feature floppy disks, cassettes, batteries, and telephones. The title track, Turn It On Again made me think about waking up, and I figured that if you were some kind of robot then "waking up" and "turning on" might be the same thing. Lastly, I was thinking about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was later adapted to become the movie Blade Runner.

‍Ultimately the best visual that represented these featured images of sheep made of telephones, which was from an art exhibit by Jean-Luc Cornec (it was a student project so I could leverage any visual pieces I wanted without worrying about copyright, ok?). It's not surprising that it worked well, because his exhibit was also created with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in mind. As I started building out the album, I realized that another element of the visual could be alarm clocks and emphasis on different digital telephone elements. I was thinking about the idea of a "wake-up call" to go along with the idea of turning on again. The colors were mostly influenced by the green LED alarm clock light color, and I brought in oranges to contrast.

Since this is one of my older projects, its good to look back at it and ask what I could have done better. I think it held up overall, but if there was one big thing I'd redo it is the typography on the lyrics. I was really caught up in the visuals and minimized the space dedicated to the text. I'd definitely do it differently today and leave them room to breath rather than such a visual fry approach. Still, I like it all the same.