Syn

Music graphics is only a piece of what design collective North gets up to, yet the techniques it applies to its work challenge all in this industry. It set about translating sound into visuals’ for an experimental project with Tokyo entertainment production company Syn, formed by Nick Wood and Simon and Yasmin Le Bon.

Syn’s cover house style, created by North, takes spoken words that are processed through sound-editing equipment and then reproduced as a ‘rich palette of visuals’ for the sleeves. Depending on the format the output is different. For example, the CD version is a visualisation of the words ‘compact disc’.

‘I prefer things to be abstract,’ says North designer Mason Wells, who is disenchanted with the generic ‘artist portrait plus typography’ look. The North-designed Sound Virus sampler CD was created by warping line diagrams of Jo Columbo furniture into a Day-Glo viral pattern.

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