I haven’t dabbled in graphic design for quite some time but ended up completing a project on the penultimate day of 2016. Here you can see the album artwork for Xamanist’s second studio album, 7, a name chosen for several reasons. It has been 7 years since his debut was released and it also contains 7 tracks. I also happened to finish the artwork at 7 in the morning and began around midnight so there’s that too. It was a rushed job to ensure that the album was actually released in the 2016 calendar year—otherwise the chain of sevens would have been broken!

Source material for this project came from the walls of Qingyu Hall in Keelung. I was interested in working with organic forms due to the obvious connection between shamanism and entheogenic plants (though these are aerial banyan roots). The numeral seven appears nowhere in the original photograph; what you see here is some clunky work with duplicated image fragments, masks, and gradient maps for emphasis. Type is set in various weights and styles of Berliner and Berliner Grotesk. The front and back covers are seamlessly integrated for no particular reason (since it’s not actually designed to be printed out and used on physical media or anything).

Unfortunately the actual quality of the original photograph used in this piece is not that great. As such, this cover doesn’t look so great when displayed at high-resolution. My only excuse is the last minute nature of the project.