Cover Art of the Week #9: Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, OK Go

When you first saw OK Go, they were probably dancing in a back yard or doing an elaborately choreographed dance routine on treadmills.

And if these clever aerobic performances were not quite enough to pique our curiosity for the release of their brand-new album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, we were also totally impressed by its excellent artwork!

The booklet’s visual concept is based on an excerpt from The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky, a book by General A.J. Pleasonton. The idea was to compare OK Go’s lyrics with the excerpt, obtain data from the different characteristics of the two texts and use them to create graphical interpretations of each analysis.

For example, the album cover was realized by compiling a list of twenty-five themes (such as “Figuring It All Out”, “Things That, in Retrospect, Proved to be Wrong”, “The Sky or Things Falling From It”, “Bodies/ Body Parts/ Bodily Function”), each representing a color, and associating them with each sentence included in both OK Go’s lyrics and Pleasonton’s text. Other diagrams displayed in the booklet are based on themes such as sentence length, parts of speech occurrences, stressed/unstressed syllables and words common to both texts. It may sound like a difficult concept to bring to fruition, but the visual result is wonderful! Have a look at some images from the insert:

Syllables. The texts are representd linearly. Each line segment corresponds to a syllable. White lines refer to A.J. Pleasonton’s text, colored ones refer to OK Go’s tracks.

Parts of Speech. Each line represents a word, and they are grouped in rings by their function (pronoun, noun, verb, adjective and so on).

Themes common to the book and to the album. The front cover art is the result of the overlapping of these graphs.

We were so excited that we couldn’t resist contacting Stefanie Posavec and Greg McInerny, who came together to bring the design to completion, to ask them more about their collaboration with the band and this brilliant project.

How did the collaboration with the band start?

Stefanie: Damian Kulash Jr., the lead singer of the band, had the idea of creating visualisations derived from the album’s namesake text, The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky, by General A.J. Pleasonton, as well as the song lyrics. He found my and Greg’s work on Charles Darwin’s text The Origin of Species (Greg is an ecologist working at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, and he initiated a project where we created visualisations of this text as part of his research), and thought that we would be able to create something similar for OK Go’s album.

How was the work split between you and Greg?

Stefanie: Greg created the programs to gather data from the text and create the final images, though for the parts of speech and syllables I analysed the text by hand and converted it into a code that Greg could then use to create the visuals. Often, I would come up with ways of representing the data roughly using Adobe Illustrator, and then Greg would replicate and refine these visuals through programming (programs mentioned below) while also adding his input with how these ideas could be visually developed, so it was quite a collaborative process.

Also, Damian Kulash Jr. was essential to producing the album cover artwork. Damian carefully analysed both the text and the band’s lyrics sentence-by-sentence according to what he thought were the 25 key themes. Because this type of analysis is so subjective, this was something that Greg and I couldn’t analyse ourselves. Damian went above and beyond what is normally needed from a client, and we think it added more meaning to the final artwork.

For the OK Go’s artwork you dealt with two topics in particular: text and music. How did you start being interested in the visual representation of text (like in your work Writing Without Words)?

Stefanie: Writing Without Words is something that I created for my MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, and I think it came out of the fact that I have loved books and the English language all my life, and I wanted to find a way of working with these themes visually. When I was in high school much of our English classes were spent closely analysing sentence grammar and creating diagrams and I think this background spurred my interest in working with the English language.

Greg: I started getting interested in visualisation during my PhD, without really knowing that it was ‘visualisation’. Scientists often use graphics and schematics to communicate, but the scientific community doesn’t really teach people how to do it. Seeing Stef’s projects on text got me really excited about a different dimension to scientific communication. I wanted to explore visualisation more and when arriving at Microsoft Research I explored some project ideas and the Darwin idea came up. So for me it didn’t start with text visualisation and doesn’t end there, working with Stef has really opened my eyes to what could and should be done. Text is interesting as it has a hierarchical structure like much biological and ecological data, and there are some analogies with science in the way we process and compare text data (interestingly, some of the visuals we produced for OK Go use a Statistical programming language [R Project] that I use for ‘science’). Many of the solutions for text visualisation have visual similes for scientific visualisations, for example Phylogenetic trees showing the relatedness between objects. But science is always that great at making the most of the visual communication. So working with Stef on text visualisation has given me a better appreciation of design and that science needs designers!

Do you often work with music material (like OK Go’s artwork or your Measuring Kraftwerk project)? And how do you like to approach it?

Stefanie: Neither Greg nor I have worked much with music, though if anyone has an exciting music-based project please send it our way! The most important thing when creating work like this is to visually find a way of representing the things that excite you about whatever your subject is. For the OK Go artwork, we loved the imagery found in both the album’s namesake book and the song lyrics and wanted to try to represent this feeling about the words visually. Maybe you need to fall a little in love with any work you are dealing with to arrive at the best design solution.

www.itsbeenreal.co.uk
research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/gregmci/

Thank you so much Stefanie and Greg!

Can’t wait to listen to OK Go? Head straight to AUPEO! and enjoy their Artist Station, or find them in our AUPEO! Stations A Decade in Song: 2000–2009 and US Indie – the latter available exclusively to AUPEO! Premium subscribers right now!