Design Context: Secret 7 - Lorde Research

With this being a fairly short brief I looked into a few of the things which I thought needed to be considered when designing an album sleeve.

I looked at music video for the song, things related to the artist via a personal blog that she had setup, basic information on the artist and in this case certain topics she speaks about in the actual song.

The Artist

Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (born 7 November 1996), known by her stage name Lorde , is a New Zealand singer-songwriter. Born in Takapuna and raised in Devonport, Auckland, she performed in various singing and drama classes as a child, and at the age of thirteen signed with Universal. Yelich-O'Connor adopted her stage name due to her fascination with "royals and aristocracy", but felt the name Lord was too masculine so added an 'e' to make it more feminine.

Her musical debut was an EP, entitled The Love Club, which was released in November 2012, and her first single, "Royals", debuted at number one on the New Zealand Top 40, and also reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013, making her the first New Zealand solo artist to have a number one song in the United States. Her debut album, Pure Heroine, was released in September 2013, receiving critical acclaim and commercial success worldwide.

Her work has earned her numerous awards and accolades. In October 2013, she jointly won the 2013 Silver Scroll award for "Royals," which celebrates outstanding songwriting achievements in original New Zealand pop music. For the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, Lorde received four nominations, in which she won Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance for "Royals.

The Music Video

I was looking at the video mainly for inspiration on what and how to design the cover, and I ended up using it get colour schemes to use.

As you can see the video has a very moody tone to it, mainly due to the neutral colours used, blues, greens and greys.

Previous Artwork

I also had a quick look at previous album art for Lorde, but did not get a lot of results as she has only 1 studio album and 1 EP, therefore I also looked at remixes.