this project is a digital marketing rollout that i completed for a musician client of mine based out of providence, ri. within this project you’ll walk through initial processes, mood boarding, and overall final results of social content & branding.

Introduction:

The China Blue is an Alt-Pop musician based in Providence, RI. Growing up listening to artists such as Michael Jackson, The 1975, and Tame Impala; he had his sights set early on becoming a musician with a true artistic vision.

I was tasked with creating a social media rollout that consisted of lyric posters, marketing collateral & cover artwork for his latest single ‘Nervous’ which was acclaimed by well known music publications such as ‘EARMILK, Lyrical Lemonade, & PopWrapped. It also secured a placement on Spotify’s Fresh Finds: Pop playlist.

Moodboards

While concepting & going back and forth with the client on the direction of the moodboard’s for colors, emotion, etc.. It became clear there were 3 Key Elements that this project was going to be based around which are the following: Moody, Grainy, Emotional.

Initially you can see with the first moodboard that the mood is very much based off the lighting, shadows, and vibrant color schemes we were going for. I wanted to really capture the power of lighting & how it can be used effectively with the proper composition.

The Grainy focus was so that this overall rollout felt very raw, vintage, and fit the indie music vibe. Grain gives this sort of edgy texture & feeling of rawness which we felt fit great giving the direction of the song & project.

Emotional visuals were basically captured by the poses & composition of each poster / the cover art which you will see later down the project.

Cover Artwork

Diving deep into any music rollout one of the key factors in the visual direction for creative is the Cover Artwork. I came up with three concepts initially for this project & each have a different strongpoint in terms of the key elements.

Concept 1: The idea between concept one was to really focus on the darkness & emotional undertone of the song while contrasting with the dark greens to really pull the viewer in.

Concept 2: I tried to play around with a few different blurs & long-exposure effects to really grasp the emotional pose to a different degree.

Concept 3 (chosen concept): This was the chosen concept for the cover art based off the power of all three elements present; compositionally speaking it is by far the best in terms of the angle of the photo, fisheye effect, etc. Emotional wise the pose is so intriguing from the angle of the photo as well.

Lyric Posters

The lyric posters were heavily based on type hierarchy that I created using the compositions of some of the left over imagery we had from the Music Video stills. I tried to create this energy behind the imagery manipulation while using blurs, color grading, etc..

The typography choices I found inspiration from bands such as Tame Impala & The 1975 by trying to utilize minimalism & negative space to capture the power of perfectly placed typography elements.

Video + Visualizers

The hired videographer for the video & promotional visualizers mackymacguire did an outstanding job with the overall editing, color grading, and vfx to really tie all of the rollout’s visual direction together.

Below you can find examples of some of the promotional content videos we had used via social media.

Photography Direction

I helped assist mackymacguire on overall direction & small editing in terms of color on the photography images used below. mackymacguire is truly an outstanding creative & made my job a hell of a lot easier on the video & color grading.

Thank you for viewing!