Fire Eyes Music
Fire Eyes, a.k.a Tim Hamilton, is an electronic musician based in Atlanta. Tim hired me to create the branding and album covers for his new venture. The new designs had to work well with the style of music, work well in any scenario, and catch the eye of his potential audience.
Logo Design
Being called Fire Eyes, Tim’s idea for his logo was a conventional emoji with fire burning from their eyes. Although most people use the same emojis, there are quite a few variations of the standard set between companies. As I couldn’t use any of the standard emojis due to copyright, I had to create my own. Tim liked my low poly work and asked if I could create a logo in that style. I also offered a few other propositions including a cleaner emoji face, and one based on the Android set.
We soon realised we didn’t really want a yellow emoji, but rather something more stylised. After some more brainstorming, we hit upon the final style. The logo would have a rough edge, but the style would be far simpler. We then had to decide the colour of the logo, and also the mouth of the character.
We wanted the character to look confident, so we chose a larger smiling mouth. Autumnal colours were then swapped for a pastel palette. We chose the pastel colours to match the space and cosmos theme of Tim’s website. The font that was used fit in nicely with the hand drawn, rough look of the rest of the logo. Finally, a few variations of the design were created with differing pastel gradients, as well as a white design for lighter backgrounds.
Album Cover Design
A logo is great to use as a way of getting a brand out there, but a musical brand is nothing without the music. Fire Eyes have released two singles at this point and both needed a cover to illustrate the music on online platforms. Tim had named his new singles, Nova and Nova Pt. 2, so I started coming up with a few space themed covers.
Tim decided he would rather have a simple cover than one featuring photography. We still went with the space theme so the new design incorporated a planet icon on a simple one colour, pastel background. I then placed the new Fire Eyes logo in the bottom right corner. With further musical releases the same format of cover will be used; an icon representing the song, a pastel background to fit in with the overall theme, and the logo in the corner.
The Application
After completing the logo and album covers, Fire Eyes have launched their great tracks onto most music platforms. The tracks appear on iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud. All the designs appear on his website too.
Final Thoughts
I was so pleased when Tim hired me to create all the branding for his great new music. We finished with a recognisable logo that can be used almost anywhere, and two album covers that represent the style of music he creates. Seeing my designs on various platforms such as iTunes and Spotify is great, and will hopefully bring in further success to Tim.