Verbal Acrobatics: Da Mystery of Chessboxin'

I want to put across different sounds of hip-hop in the 90s era, you have the soulful and jazz infusions with A Tribe Called Quest who kind of paint a picture where you're on a trip to space with them and you're all dancing and having a good time, no explicit language either. Wu Tang Clan on the other hand are als a hip-hop group hailing from NY who pretty much define the word 'gritty', they really feel like a clan attacking you one by one with their verses in turn, almost taking shots at you in turn. The videos dark and moody, I find the( (lets be honest) rubbish effects and rubbish type design with early Wu Tang Clan endearing and definitely adds to the early 90s hip-hop vibe. As if they got their mate to design it for them. So I'm going to hopefully pull off going down this route too with stretched and manipulated type, designed to be a bit dodgy. A Tribe Called Quest always have had impeccable and very playful hand-drawn design, Wu's visuals are very different.

'Da Mystery of Chessboxin' is the track I've picked off this album. So I'll be focusing on the typography on this album cover and applying some stuff from me too

One of the most memorable traits of the Wu was their love of martial arts and kung fu movies, often infusing martial arts quotes from films and wordplay into their songs, even their videos. Their album names reflect chinese mythology too with "36 chambers" referring to The 36 Chambers of Shaolin, a highly influential martial arts movies of the 70's.

Here's the video for the song in question:

Very rough layout sketch:

Again, very rough literally just listening to the song and trying to get the general sound and tone of voices down, for example ODB's verses are very loose and exagerrated, often lengthening words. "GHOSTFACE KILLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH". Whereas Method Man's chorus of "To all my people are you with me where you at. At the front at the back, killer bees on attack!" is much more compact and to the point.

##Process screenshots

##Finished poster

Well this was interesting to do, it's nothing like what I've usually done and out of context it's almost a pretty bad piece of design but actually this is what I wanted it to be, a sort of attack of the senses with bars and verses hitting you form everywhere, which is what the song makes me feel like. Visually I hope to capture what early 90s gritty gangsta rap looked like, stretched out type all over the place. I also added Japanese translations for some of the rap lyrics to add to the kung fu Shaolin aura Wu Tang Clan has.

It's so much fun working on this! 4 more to go, Time constraints may make that difficult so at the worst I'll at least have 1 complete vinyl sleeve with 3 posters and records housed within but I'm focused on completing what I set out to do