David Bowie Album Cover
This is a redesign of David Bowie’s classic 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” that I originally completed in the middle of my first year. I decided to revisit it after Bowie’s untimely passing on January 10th of this year.
Conceptually, I was inspired by Bowie’s cryptic storyline of an alien rockstar who visits earth to influence earth’s children. To capture a childlike, handcrafted aesthetic, I created an outer space background from felt, made a papier-mâché globe, and traced the title with a Crayola crayon.
The lyrics written by Bowie are one of the highlights of the album. They tell the tale of Ziggy Stardust, a prophetic, hedonistic alien rockstar who comes to earth in its final days to foretell the coming of the otherworldly Starman. It was an ideal exercise in microtypography.
I cut out the stars from glitter-covered foam.
For the label on the center of the disc, the papier-mâché globe once again makes an appearance. I made the papier-mâché from a torn-up issue of The Stranger and painted it with fluid acrylic paint.
I used myself as a model for the Starman, the black hole-jumping infinite who, per Bowie’s story, has come to save the world. I cut the silhouette out from felt. I combined most of the separate elements in Photoshop and set the type in InDesign.
