Rie fu
The Brief
Sony Music Japan commissioned Airside to design the CD artwork for Japanese singer-songwriter Rie fu’s album Urban Romantic, along with two accompanying single releases.The album title expresses Rie fu’s vision of herself and her music and she wanted the artwork to represent her eclectic tastes and idiosyncratic attitude.
Our Solution
After listening to the music and talking with Rie fu, we identified two opposing elements that the artwork would need to reflect: warm nostalgia and cooler realism. We soon came up with the idea of a tree house city. A tree house always evokes fuzzy images of childhood and long, lazy summer days, but placing an urban environment amongst it branches brings focus and a city’s sense of pace and purpose.Each branch of the tree house city represents a song on the album and show scenes from the daily life of a girl. Each scene is detailed on the relevant song page in the album’s inlay booklet.
It was important to us that the single releases shared the visual identity of the album therefore the two singles featured the corresponding artwork from the inlay booklet. This ensured each Rie Fu release were all products of one cohesive world.