Hades – Świattło / CD Packaging

Design & Concept: MrWalczuk / OsomStudios
Motion & Additonal Design: Adam Caban
Project Management: Marta Skrzynska, Anna Wojcik, Prosto Label
Project Type: Produced, Commercial Work
Location: Warsaw, Poland

Hades’s third album. And my third attempt to find a visual language to it (you can find previous cases here and here). After the first listening, MrWalczuk knew that this will be a different journey as Hades’s style evolved and brought a different light to the whole album. But let’s start from the beginning..

“Świattło” (eng. “Lightt”) – album name is a mixture of two polish words – world and light. But connected it gets a new meaning which is ‘world in background’. So MrWalczuk started researching, different light symbols from different cultures, iconography, and general look & feel. That’s how the main illustration was born – great, big sun and smaller, black moon behind going around.

MrWalczuk decided not to use classic typography – Helvetica or Avant Garde as the main font. And thanks to Mateusz Machalski and Warszawskie Kroje, MrWalczuk has discovered this gorgeous, poster font, based on old, wall paintings from 70’s Warsaw – Magiel. MrWalczuk felt the same warmth about it as he has found while listening to the album and he decided to go with it trough the whole project. I’ve also choosen Avant Garde, as a classy, additional font, to have clean paragraphs and a bit technically detailed look.

Beside the aesthetics and mood, golden color came as obvious. Shiny and glittery, electrical spark. Classy and gentle at the same time and also – giving great printing opportunities to follow.

The next goal was to make the box meaningful and to use the “Świattło” word connection. MrWalczuk decided to create a custom-made box, cut trough, which gave it two meanings: one is that you are able to see the actual CD trough the box, and it leaves everything but music in the background. The other thing is light usually goes trough the layers.

Few prototypes later, MrWalczuk was quite happy with the box construction, design was finished and it was ready to print. To make it even more classy, few elements were supposed to be printed with hot-stamping technique. Matching golds, bleeds n slugs.