vandelux
Evan White (Vandelux) makes music that combines acoustic and electronic sounds, focusing on balancing retro nostalgia with contemporary electronic production. You can find his music with millions of listeners on streaming services, in many of the top charts for electronic music, and performing at some of the top venues and festivals worldwide. I worked with Evan to develop a visual style for his album ‘When The Light Breaks,’ crafting a direction for other designers to continue to follow after I had designed the initial album covers, canvas animations, and posters.
tulum
Evan and I began our collaboration on a short project for visual assets for the release of his single, ‘Tulum’. Designing the concept for this release was an exploration of how his soon-to-be-constructed album would all come together visually.
“Tulum” is a minimal, slightly dark, yet tropical track that takes the listener somewhere between the club and the jungle. Evan and I selected a photo from a photographer’s collection to visually represent the track. It featured a contrast of a tropical scene and bright colors combined with a darker-colored car dashboard with deep blacks and gold to represent the track’s balance of beachy atmosphere and eerie chord progressions.
The track features a constant vocal, “I’ve never been to Tulum, but I’ve heard it’s nice.” I chose to use themes of reflection and parallax to create a ‘mirage,’ alluding to the idea that hearing a place is nice can only give you a partial sense of the real thing.
“TULUM” ALBUM COVER & CANVAS
I focused on highlighting the dancer as the center by creating an inner frame utilizing perpendicular lines in the composition and the ‘mirage’ theme on the right side, using the reflection of the steering wheel to connect with the real one.
I designed and animated a canvas to explore the idea of the “mirage” further. The animation bounces in and out of the photo, bringing the viewer away from the still image and into parallax layers. The bounciness of the animation visually complements the track’s house beat.
singles
Months after ‘Tulum‘ was released, Evan and I resumed our collaboration, this time for his full-fledged album combining some of his new songs and some of his oldest unreleased tracks. My role was to develop a strategy for how the whole release would have visual consistency across dispersed launches over half a year.
Evan planned to release five singles to build the excitement and then release the whole album. My goal was to make a visual story between each single cover that would eventually peak upon the listener finally seeing the album cover and tour poster after seeing similar designs for the singles they had listened to leading up.
We worked with a sculptor who created highly detailed images of sculptures with magnets. I built upon his color usage to craft a strategy for using type and composition for each release. Similar to the Tulum cover and canvas, I chose to use as subtle design elements as possible to keep the focus on the details of the sculptures themselves.
COVER & CANVAS TEMPLATES
I replicated my template across singles to allow certain elements, such as the length of the track and title, to conform and still hold a balance on all sides to keep the center of the square the focus. To accompany each song, I made animation templates for each single that would highlight the details of the sculpture through subtle movements and glitching motions. Each cover could be placed into the Adobe AE file to create the same animation style.
album & tour
In the middle of releasing the singles, the dates for Evan’s tour began to be finalized and approached. I made a tour poster to promote the tour, pulling from the direction of the single covers but still focusing on highlighting the details of the sculptures. For advertisements and social posts, I designed assets using standards similar to those of the single covers and posters for another point of consistency.
TOUR POSTER & PROMOTION
For the poster, I leaned into the theme of ‘mirage’ by focusing on how the type and shape elements could sit slightly above the image, offering a parallax between the highly detailed background image and slightly ink-bled edges of graphics. The downward motion from the graphic combined with textural overlay guides the viewer’s eyes down and to the dates while keeping balance in the composition.
For show promotion ads, I made a template by which each show could have its assets by changing the date, time, venue, and city with ample space to conform with the background. Across social platforms, cropping from the top down allowed the same design for an IG story to be used as a square and still amply show the sculptures
While the tour was happening, I began concepts for the album cover with the tentative name, ‘Radium,’ one of the radioactive elements of the periodic table. The sculptor’s image that was chosen featured a combination of green and red, extensive depth of field, and visually told most of the story about being radioactive to the viewer. I leaned into adding a small “stamp,” as if each album was stamped by hand with ink.
“RADIUM” COVER CONCEPTS
Leaning into the idea of a “stamp,” my concept for the album cover had only a tiny bit of design elements in the bottom right corner. The range of options was based on how explanatory or ambiguous it was to make the concept available for the listener to determine that Radium was a periodic element. The idea of the “stamp” could be used in other places, such as concert visuals, merch, temporary tattoos for concertgoers, and social media posts.
After some time had passed from these concepts being created, the album’s name was changed to ‘When the Light Breaks.’ In tandem, I transitioned the core elements of the visual system I had created to another team of designers, who took my vision past this point to make the album cover more tour posters, single covers, and animations. The project performed exceptionally well over time, creating a cohesive system for all touchpoints for Evan’s listeners and helping accompany the album to millions of streams and live performances in major cities throughout the United States.