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.
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.
Rie fu's first single from Urban Romantic, Romantic, was released in November 2008 and has since gained a lot of press across Japan.
Rie fu had a very particular vision for her music and Airside managed to successfully realise this by working closely with Rie fu despite physical distance between us.
1 x CD album cover illustration and inlay booklet
2 x CD singles cover illustration and inlay card
1 x Screen printed poster design
"I have always been a big Airside fan, ever since I was in art school in London, so I can't explain how thrilled I was to work with them. The cover artwork design is charmingly beautiful and stunningly well-made, matched the concept of the song completely, and with no doubt I can say that it's the best CD cover out of all of the records I have released through the past four years. Thank you for delivering this wonderful design to the Japanese music market!"
Rie fu
