brat

Nothing could have prepared me for the fact that the Brat album cover was designed entirely in Figma. And the pixelation on the album cover was not intentional, but was actually just a mistake when exporting the file. The cover was designed by Brent David Freeney, who's an art director that grew up outside of New Orleans. In 2023, he was given a directive by Charli XCX to create this album cover for Brad. She had two requirements: had to be green, had to say Brad. The process was way more laborious than he began collecting these images year round just as a source of inspiration, including this green Korean customs form he received while travelling there, a Whitney Houston water bottle design, and other album artworks that only use text. Then he did a second exploration, exploring typography, colour, composition, design, kerning, just to get a sense of what the BRAT universe would look like. Then there was a third round with the photography from the album shoot to see if that could play into some of the designs. Sorry, my phone died. Anyway, finally there was this mosaic of options which took one central idea and varied it by colour and font weight. One that was chosen was this teeny tiny one here. But then the question was, how do we actually print this on vinyl and get this into production? So Brent literally just took a screenshot of that tiny thumbnail and exported it at 12,000 pixels wide. And then that ended up becoming the final album cover. It's crazy to see that one of the biggest creative campaigns of modern culture was made entirely in Figma and was a mix of, like, really careful but also spontaneous decisions. Bye bye.