Vinyl Cover
Seeing Sounds
Seeing Sounds is the third studio album by the American rock band N.E.R.D., released on June 10, 2008. The album plays with the idea of literally “seeing” sound, drawing from Pharrell Williams’ personal experience with sensory perception and how music shapes the world around him.
This project was created for my third Illustration course in my fifth semester. For the assignment, I designed a vinyl cover for the album Seeing Sounds, aiming to capture the overall vibe of its tracks while playfully visualizing the concept of experiencing music through synesthesia.
I closed my eyes, and that's when it started...
This design was inspired by Pharrell Williams’ personal experience with synesthesia and how N.E.R.D. translated the concept into the tracks of their album. Each track had a blend of instruments/genres, with each instrumentation being unique to one another. (They basically knew how well their sounds work)
I aimed to create a visual that evokes the sensory overlap of the condition, while also reflecting the band’s (or The Neptunes’) signature futuristic sound and cosmic, outer-space aesthetic. However, it was very tricky to put the idea into design as I went through multiple concepts before finalizing it.
