Defiant - Collapse: Visual Theme
"Climate crisis is now. Sixth mass extinction is ongoing. Humanity won't survive unless we tear down the toxic systems which is destroying the ecosystem we depend on.
No time to hesitate, act now for a future to all of us."
'Collapse' is a third single of my band 'Defiant'. The lyrics tell about the climate crisis we are facing right now and the main message of the song is to act now.
Right: album art, Left: sticker designs
The whole process of designing the visuals around the song started by making the album art, which I wanted to be sort of complicated, restless and full of details. It had to be bright and striking and also reflect the horrible crisis the song was all about.
The main elements in the visual theme of 'Collapse' are the animal skeletons; rhino, elephant, polar bear and wolf, all endangered or somehow affected by human beings. We kept using the animals (especially the polar bear) everywhere in our social media platforms so that people would learn to recognize them. It worked really well and after a while we started to hear comments such as "I don't even need to see your band's name or logo, I just see that skeleton and know it's you".
For the sticker designs I minimized the amount of details and chose to use different colour for different animals. Band stickers often tend to be really dark and even black & white, so I went to the opposite direction and used really bright colours that could easily take the attention and pop out.
In addition to the stickers we wanted to do something different and useful. After a while we decided to make some bookmarks.
In January 2020 we made a small batch of koala bear tote bags. All the profit was donated to the emergency help for Australian bush fires.
