Experiments at ivanwlam.com

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A few months ago, I was looking through the photos from one of my former Design teachers’ Facebook albums. One of the photos was a random looking design piece. The captions for that photo were instructions to generate some text and image, which you will use to put together into a album cover.

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 – Post it with this text in the “caption” and TAG the friends you want to join in.

It seemed to be one of those random, you-can’t-choose-your-client sort of project that I thought would be great for the Experiments’ Graphic Design section. So here I’m opening Graphic with this piece, encouraging others to participate and share your experimental work as well.

My Content

• Wikipedia article: Johann Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Weimar
• Full quote: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” —Douglas Adams (1952–2001). Link.
• Flickr photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yototab/3546278482/

Process

I sort of feel bad about the photo because it was of someone’s kid and I’m using it for a personal project. The photo is copyrighted, so I feel extra bad for using it.

I was also disappointed by the photo because it was already so good for an album cover that you sort of knew where the text would be if this were a normal cover (it would probably go on the right where that blackspace is). So I had to think harder to make it look different and convey a feeling that is not necessarily similar to the photo’s intent.