CD Cover Design

No brief. Individual production. Fun in design.

ZILCH

SPACE MONKEY PUNKS from JAPAN

Due to the sheer chaos of this song by Zilch, a rock supergroup formed in 1996 by hide (Hideto Matsumoto; died 2 May 1998), Ray McVeigh, Paul Raven, Joey Castillo and I.N.A. (Kazuhiko Inada), a visual idea quickly formed in my head. The song mentions a yellow man from Mars, and... well, give it a listen here. You will understand my choices for this album cover then.

Some tiny little satellite
Some tiny yellow man from Mars
So beam me down into your home
Can't find me when I got to go, go, go

Zilch: Space Monkey Punks from Japan - Front Cover

Zilch: Space Monkey Punks from Japan - Inner Left Side

Zilch: Space Monkey Punks from Japan - Inner Right Side

Zilch: Space Monkey Punks from Japan - Back Cover

PROCESS

This song is so crazy that I just had to do something about it. So I made a cover for a single. I was bent on the wildly colourful carousel and bright magenta/pink because of hide's (Hideto Matsumoto) bold hairstyle and contrasting, vibrant outfits.

The glam era was certainly not over in Japan, where Visual Kei had emerged from the Japanese underground rock scene in the 1980s as a fusion of Western glam, Japanese Kabuki theatre, and shoujo manga.

Initially, I created the cover using images I found online (yes, Google). However, I later got lucky when I happened to be in the right place at the right time and was able to take a few photos of a carousel outside the Natural History Museum in London.

The Mars and the Moon were sourced from the NASA website, then I added the Zilch logo, hide on a pony, a couple of space stations (scrapped) and another pink vector satellite (also scrapped).