Their collaborative process usually begins with a sustained period of seclusion, during which time the pair brainstorm ideas and begin to chip away at the design – before the marketing team gets their hands on it. Images that have been shot for the album, as well as the music itself, serve as jumping-off points for Mary, who works with Mitski to develop a cover artwork that enhances the album’s sonic offerings. For Mary, it is important that during this process she doesn’t “centre the design (or the designer), but rather lets the design function as another gesture of the music”.
Looking through Mitski’s album catalogue, it’s clear that typography plays a big part in the design concept for the covers, and Mary confirms this: “Typography is vital to any design project – it is a form that communicates, in addition to the language it makes.” Indeed, where album covers are concerned, the aesthetic of the type is arguably more important than the words it represents, and across the three albums that Mary has worked on, this consideration is evident. On Be The Cowboy, for instance, Mary extensively researched movie title sequences, to find a typeface that matched up to the cinematic moodboard Mitski has provided. She landed on Steelfish by Typodermic, a sans serif reminiscent of the densely laid out credits at the bottom of old movie posters, and Calafia by Neil Secretario, which nods to the design conventions of film noir. “Calafia outlined [also] functions as a ‘veil’ on the cover, that the subject is looking through,” adds Mary. “I was thinking about the gaze, the viewer, the audience, and stardom itself.”
