Serato: Sound Packs

After developing a lightning-fast new music production software: SeratoStudio, Serato wanted to embolden producers to create and customise any genre of music by developing free-use Sound Packs – eclectic libraries of downloadable sounds and instruments. Working with world renowned record labels and iconic artists, this empowered professional and blooming beatmakers to unleash their creativity with the same toolkit their favourite artists use. Each Sound Pack represented an artist or a genre in full, and every Sound Pack needed to be creatively represented with album artwork.

While studying design at university, a lecturer once told me that most employed designers make boring shit, and I should expect to do the same. This advice has rarely ever been my experience, and never less than on this project. Encapsulating genres within a single image was an exercise that I fell in love with. It was a rare opportunity to marry music and artwork together in a way that felt accurate, inspirational, and honoured the roots and history of the music at hand. Whether it was creating artwork that visualised the deep connection the SP–1200 drum machine had in shaping the early Boom-Bap sound of Hip Hop in New York, or digging deeper into the arrival of dubstep as the anthem of anti-authoritarian youth culture in the UK, exploring design through music was an enlightening project that has shaped me to this day.