The Good Days Between
In 2023, my good friend Ty (also known as Lophiile) approached me about creating some graphic work and a new website (lophiile.co) for his upcoming beat tape.
He wanted his visuals to embrace the wild (and sometimes corny) side of the 90's skater and hip-hop scene that he grew up with. This meant fisheye lenses, Thrasher magazine inspired layouts; graffiti, grain, and grime.
Ty loved the idea of something truly scrappy and rough-around-the-edges. An escape from the polished "netflixification" of nostalgia that emulates an aesthetic without any character.
I drew inspiration from documentaries like Style Wars (1983) and Piece by Piece (2005) and ended up in a YouTube rabbit-hole of homemade skate videos. These works painted a vibrant picture of the early 90s hip-hop scene.
What are "the good days between"?
Pretty early into the project, I stressed to myself the importance of understanding what this piece of music meant to Ty, and why he had chosen the name "The Good Days Between". We chatted about it for a while and I summarized his thoughts as follows:
In the midst of hard times, some days feel better than others. This music is an ode to those days. A call to appreciate and find relief in the relative calm in the storm.
Like pages in a sketchbook, each track is tied to a period in Ty's life representing amalgamation of his personal, musical, and cultural influences.
Bringing it all together
With a goal to seamlessly weave visuals into this dense and meaningful tapestry, I looked no further than Ty's camera roll. Much of the tape had been written and produced while he was living in London. He shared an album of photos that his sister (shout-out to Heb) had taken on her point-and-shoot film camera during that time.
It was immediately apparent that Heb's photos had exactly what we were looking for. The somber, dreary, or mundane captured alongside the warm, bright, and bubbly flashes of good days between.
Photo by @hebontheweb
I placed these photos into editorial layouts and mockups I had created earlier in the process. From here, it became abundantly clear that these photos were the heart of "The Good Days Between" and everything clicked into place. These photos were instrumental in directing and informing the designs.
I built organic shapes and open layouts inspired by the curvature of skate parks. Punched-out, oblong image containers complimented everything from wide-angle shots of lowriders to picturesque European landscapes. Pops of graffiti and sketches were drawn, scanned, and composited into everything, balancing out the rigidity of perfect grids. By the end, my worktable was stained with paint and I had certainly worn out my welcome at the library using their printer and scanner.
Ty loved the raw and real texture of printed and scanned graphics. Most anything that could be printed and re-scanned was printed and re-scanned at the Brooklyn Public Library. The album cover went through an especially unique process of being printed, crumpled, scratched on pavement, submerged in water, and scanned before it finally had the grungy texture we were looking for.
While it's impossible to capture all the love and care that went into this project, I'm embedding a figma file here with most of the consolidated conceptual work. Feel free to explore the many ideas, iterations, and pivots that eventually condensed into the final deliverables. I'm very proud of the way this turned out. I find it incredibly fulfilling to design something with the intention of capturing an emotion or feeling.
"Do I give into the pain, or do I find a way?
Will I reach my truth again?
All my friends have turned away.
Years of holding on to anger has led my path astray.
But I'm getting back to my youth, and I used to be able
to choose.
Cause I used to be able to choose."
— Truth (Outro). Lophiile, The Good Days Between
Listen to Lophiile's The Good Days Between