Step-Mother-In-Law is a complete music packaging design project including a full album, tour posters, logos, and more. Drawing inspiration from a 60’s comedy album and a British invasion staple, explore this mashup project.  

At the Start of this Project I got two albums to pull design elements from, Betty Walker’s “Hello Ceil, Its Me!!!” a comedy album from the 60’s and The Best Of Herman's Hermits, a 60’s British invasion type. Next, I deconstructed the albums to their different elements ultimately finding Copper Black typeface, the various portraits and the red/green color aesthetic the most intriguing. Then I focused on Mashups though ligature symbols exploring the concepts of combining objects found on each album. This is also where I started playing around with the idea of face merging, by line drawings. While researching for this project I was inspired by the work of Eric Timothy Carlson and his work with ligature symbols on Bon Iver’s, “22, A Million” and how he was able to take these symbols originally made for the cover and repurposed them for the whole identity around the album. Looking at the language on both albums I discovered that both albums had a track called “mother-in-law" which sparked the title of my newfound band, I also pulled the track list from mashups of the language found on both albums. In my first attempts at a front cover for my album I played with my “drum chicken’ Ligature symbol, which ended up being the band logo of sorts; the TV found on Walker's album, which ended up being the inside of my gatefold; and of course, the face merging, which ended up as my final design. This is also where I used frequency separation to apply the texture found on the scaled-up portrait of walker and was able to apply to the rest of the identity system.  In my final design I utilize the track list on the back of the album to echo the relationship between the common person and their step-mother-in-law found on the front. Whenever the Step-Mother-In-Law is referenced, for example “Her Side,” the perspective is always just a little bit off, just like her. Moving into making posters, I knew I wanted to use the colors and texture along with the imagery found throughout the album design while swapping background color to avoid reptation.  

As an extension for this project, I always imagined Step-Mother-In-Law as a small band that is just running with this concept of a Step-In-Law relationship, So I wanted their merchandise and advertising to feel as if it was almost handmade using stencils and spray paint. The “chicken drum’ in addition to the “step-mother-in-law tattoo” acted as the focal point for these additions.  

Below you can explore the full music package design as well as the original inspiration albums.