Petr Yac 'We Have Much More In Common Than What Divides Us'

Petr Yac "We Have Much More In Common Than What Divides Us" Case Study

The cover design is the result of an attempt to graphically represent the album's music that is minimalist but full of lively nuances. Traditional dub techniques used in the production of the album introduce a dose of unpredictability to the music. This unpredictability and musical minimalism became the starting point for the concept of the cover.

Using the possibilities of digital printing, each copy of the cover is unique. Compositions were created using a proprietary program that generated them randomly based on predetermined rules.

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The length of the album (40 minutes) was converted to seconds (2400), from which the square root (~49) was taken. This gave the number of modules in the length of the grid side. The grid was applied to the whole surface of the cover. Thus, the cover field represents the length of the album.

Grid where one module equals one second

Construction of the cover no. 1

Similarly, divisors were calculated from the duration of each track. This made possible to create rectangles whose area is equal to the length of the respective tracks. Each of them has at least two and a maximum of eight shape variants.

The limitation is the length of the grid side - the longer side of the rectangle cannot exceed 47 modules (49-2 modules placed on the margin). Each track is assigned a shade of grey, with track one being the lightest and track seven being the darkest.

The length of track no. 2

All possible variants of representing track no. 2

Every cover consists of seven rectangles. Which rectangle (from the pool of available ones) represents a given track, its position and the layer order was randomly decided by a computer program.

The program written in the Processing language is responsible for 300 unique compositions. None of them have been modified in any way. Interestingly, the program strongly preferred placing the rectangles close together – an unforeseen reference to the title of the album.

Back cover and every front cover

The typeface used (Supply) refers to OCR typefaces and emphasizes the technicality of both the music and the design. The typographic composition of the back cover is inspired by operating systems' programming consoles.

While breaking the monochrome scheme of the graphics, yellow vinyl complements the underlying idea behind the design. Taking advantage of the possibilities of digital printing, part of the edition has personal dedications to musicians, journalists and friends and acquaintances.