WEEK 2
Our first guest teacher for the year is Nina Tsur, one of my talented Passion to Paid students!
Nina is a designer, illustrator, and motion artist based in NJ. She draws funky letters, makes silly gifs, and loves making stupid things that make people smile. Her work is colorful, humorous, and takes a lot of inspiration from the 2000s and the nostalgia that comes from it. A few of her clients include Adult Swim, GIPHY, Spoon Radio, and Penguin Random House.
When she’s not working, she’s either watching reality TV (Jersey Shore and all of its spin-off shows) or playing on her Nintendo Switch.
This week's assignment is inspired by her brilliant passion project, Mixed Feels Mix CDs, a fun series that explores what mix cd art would look like if millennials still made them today. As a millennial myself, I LOVE following along with this project, and I hope you will too!
From Nina:
It's the mid-2000's.
You boot up the family computer and open up Limewire, looking for new songs to download. You check the size and format of each file to make sure you're not downloading a virus. After the downloads are complete, you open up iTunes to carefully curate a playlist that will forever be burned onto a CD for yourself, your BFF, or your crush.
You don't know how to pirate Photoshop yet, so the graphic design had to be done by hand. No jewel case for the art? No problem. Draw right on the CD itself.
I used to make mix CDs all the time when I was a kid, carefully drawing the title on each CD (I was lettering before I even knew what it was). When coming up with ideas for a passion project, I knew I wanted to combine my love for the 2000s with my love for lettering.
Pretty quickly I realized I can bring back the art of mix CDs! Mix CDs are like a little time machine that can hold only 700 megabytes of memories. Listening to some of my old CDs (which have since turned into Spotify playlists) brings me back to different times in my life and in the world, with all of its highs and lows.
Your assignment: Design a mix CD cover that captures the moment you're in right now.
You can create your CD art however you'd like, I personally use this mockup. Bonus points if you make an accompanying playlist for your mix CD!
This project doesn't take itself too seriously. The illustrations are wonky and the design layouts are questionable, but that's the beauty of a mix CD. Take yourself back to when you were a kid making art and don't worry about making pixel-perfect posts for Instagram. The most important thing to remember is to have FUN! :)
Some prompt ideas:
Design a cover that reflects you at this moment. How are you feeling? What are you doing? What's on your mind? Is there a major life event that happened recently?
Design a cover that currently reflects the world. You can cover any news: good or bad, big or small, local or global.
Don’t forget to use the hashtags #HOMwork & #HOMwork2021 & tag @nina.tsur and @homsweethom when you post your work, too! We’ll be sharing our favorites in our Stories all week!
x Nina & Lauren
P.S. You can keep up with Nina on Instagram, where she posts her projects, events, and more!
And if you want to learn how to launch a creative passion project of your very own, consider joining Passion to Paid, my best-selling marketing class for visual artists and designers.
