I think it's evident that I love Halsey and I particularly love Badlands. I just love how Halsey is so personal with their songs and doesn't hold back. This month, I decided to make posters for Badlands, since it's one of my favorite all-time albums.
Process
My process was pretty interesting. I started off by listening to the album and writing down lyrics that I gravitated towards and themes I was noticing in the songs. The theme I noticed the most was how they are hopeful even when there is some obstacle in their life. There is this duality, where there is some love with these men they are seeing but they are aware of how toxic they are.sketchbook
I sketched some logos for Badlands. I didn't want it to be exactly like the design of Badlands but I did take a lot of the colors that Halsey ended up using in their promotion of this album.
I wanted there to be some dirtiness to this logo but also not too dirty and play around with this duality. I was thinking of just going with a typeface that reflected this but when I decided to look back at my sketch book, I really loved this logo with some tweaking.
Then after deciding on the logo. As for the visuals, I relistened to the album and decided to visually portray the lines in the songs.
Castle
This line really stuck out to me because it was showing they have a long road ahead but it's worthwhile. This reminded me of cracks in the streets like what is seen. I think it's fitting with the castle at the end. These blue and pink colors are the two most common colors in Halsey's marketing of this album.
Colors
Speaking of colors, this line is my absolute favorite. It signifies that this person was making them into a lifesuck and you don't feel yourself when you're with them and ultimately when you're not making their life better, then that's when problems arise. I felt that using this color analogy is perfect to signify exactly what they mean.
When I originally decided to switch it up to song posters, I knew I had to take this line, since it's arguably the most descriptive line on the album in a visual way. So, all I needed was a lilac sky with a silhouette of a hand touching another hand and there we have it.
Gasoline
But really the process was I was playing around with this image that I found on Tumblr. Then as I kept on playing around, I realized I could make it into this Halsey poster series. I really liked how there is this hopeful tone to it amongst some dark stuff and it's all about this duality.
I think this could be applied to a lot of the lines in Badlands, to be honest. But I particularly like this line from Gasoline because the vilain isn't some guy or some person it's their own voice. Our inner thoughts can drag us down more than a person can. When you are lookng at a mountain, a lot of it is very personal. Yeah, it's great when you reach to the top but it's a lot of hard work to get there.
This was a fun project I did. I might come back to do more versions of these with other songs off of the album or I'll do another album from Halsey or another album that I really love.