EN
Sector: Music
Task: Catalog Cover Designs
Project Highlights:
- The country’s largest sheet music producer was looking for a partner to create the new seasonal cover photos for their five bi-annual catalog brochures.
- Given minimal guidance that included mosaic-style, fall theme to promote their new sheets for the season, Assemble was tasked with all creative direction and execution for all five musical categories.
- Our design team took advantage of MidJourney to turn our original ideas into visual concepts that launched our creative execution into hyper speed.
- We took AI’s output and fine tuned the instruments it produced digitally, building out each section to ensure accuracy and originality.
- With the strategic blend of AI tools and human skill, our team was able to deliver truly imaginative cover images in a fraction of the original timelines, producing significant cost savings for the client.
The Challenge:
As the country’s largest sheet music producer, this client prides itself on highly original and polished imagery for their biannual catalog that shares all their new song sheets for the season. So when it came to bringing their fall cover photos for their five primary service categories (Orchestra, Choral, General Music, Church, Concert Band), they relied on Assemble like they had many seasons prior.
The client requested that each cover encompass the fall theme into its imagery, looking for a mosaic style design that would achieve both creativity and sophistication. With specific production and distribution dates lingering, they also expected something quick — that didn’t break the budget.
The Approach:
While minimal direction from a client can be a real challenge for some, it’s an opportunity the Assemble team thrives on. Our designers could blend their creative expertise and technical understanding to turn the client’s ambiguous vision into one-of-a-kind art. We started the process by using the AI tools in MidJourney Discord to turn our creative concepts into visual representations. While the technology couldn’t master the fine details of each instrument, it did offer a captivating fall background that could easily be used and refined across each unique cover.
With the main concepts in place, our designers utilized stock images for the instruments, playing around with positioning and scaling against the fall backdrop. But instead of searching hundreds of stock photos for the proper look and feel of each mosaic tile, we created the unique colors and textures in Midjourney, tracing various components of the instruments from the images to create digital replicas in photoshop that allowed us to achieve the handcrafted accuracy that the client expected.
The Big Wins:
By implementing both AI and human techniques into the design process, we were able to engineer highly creative and realistic cover images in a fraction of the time it would have manually. And with each cover, we only got more efficient, further expediting final delivery even more for the client. What would have likely taken two weeks in terms of creation and replication for five unique covers, took around 8 hours in total. The result was incredibly original and eye-catching cover images that all visually marry within one cohesive collection.
The client was thrilled with our blend of approaches to ensure the most cost-efficient process and quality outcomes. The success of this project reflects Assemble’s understanding of when and how to apply AI-powered tools to make work faster without sacrificing the human creativity and originality that our clients’ deserve.