La Maison de Fêtes · Creative Direction
Prepared for Aria Nova
We have prepared two creative directions for your suite.
Choose the one that speaks to you.
Four colours that belong to 9pm in a legendary room. Deep enough to hold silence. Charged enough to hold electricity.
You asked for Bodoni Moda. It is exactly right. High contrast strokes — the typographic equivalent of the album's dynamic range. The hairlines are violet light. The bold strokes are obsidian.
The invitation is a room. Specifically: the curved underground corridor of Electric Lady — the room where the album was born. Direction A is rooted in place, in the physical weight of where this all happened. Violet light on curved walls. The geometry of a space that has held Hendrix, Bowie, Beyoncé — and now ULTRAVIOLET.
The design language is cinematic and precise. Wide-format imagery. Bodoni Moda set with deliberate tension between hairline and bold. The QR code arrives as a design element — a transmission point embedded in the composition, not appended to it. The AN monogram appears once, as a label mark on vinyl: small, confident, exactly where it should be.
Direction B never shows the room. It never needs to. Instead: pure typographic force. "ULTRAVIOLET" at a scale that doesn't fit. Letters that are almost too large. The word broken into its own geometry — a Peter Saville Factory Records sleeve translated into obsidian and violet. The album title is the only image you need.
This is the bolder reading of the briefing's hidden heart. "This is a piece of art, not an invitation." Direction B takes that literally. Every line of copy is positioned with Wim Crouwel grid discipline. The handwritten Oslo notepad line appears once — in violet, at barely visible scale — as a watermark. Only people who look closely find it.
When I read your briefing, I heard something specific: the feeling of a room holding its breath before the world hears what was made inside it. Seventy-five people who need to hear it before anyone else. That is not a party — it is a moment of trust.
That detail stayed with me. Both directions begin there — they simply arrive differently. Direction A takes you into the room itself: the curved walls, the violet light, the physical weight of Electric Lady. Direction B takes you into the music: the word ULTRAVIOLET at a scale that feels sonic, not decorative. Both will be the kind of thing people frame.
Both directions are built from your briefing — they interpret it differently. The room, or the sound. Choose the one that resonates, and your full suite will be built from that vision alone.