News: Safe Side Discuss The Artwork For ‘Blossom’

“When we listen to our own songs we try to look at them like this: would we listen to them if we weren’t in the band?” muses Danny Gaisford, bassist of Essex pop punks, Safe Side. “We genuinely would,” he (fortunately) confirms. Safe Side’s sophomore E.P ‘Blossom’, a collection of highly infectious tuneage which successfully blends the band’s pop punk roots with elements of Alternative rock, and vocalist Frank Yates’ distinctly homegrown delivery. “Frank's voice sets us apart,” opines Danny; “Pop punk is known for American pronunciation, no matter where you are from. So having a particularly British voice in our sound is a good thing.” To celebrate the imminent release of the band’s EP on 15th July, Chris discusses how their artwork came about and how it ties into their musical identity…

For ‘Blossom' we consciously decided against illustrated artwork and also that we wanted a mature image to accompany our maturing sound. We knew we wanted artwork that can be perceived in whichever way the listener/viewer desires, while still relating to the EP's title. We went back and forth with ideas for weeks not being able to settle on anything.

Eventually, we picked an idea I sent across to the guys of a silhouette image shrouded in light and blemishes. The original image is of my girlfriend, which I then (because she asked me to) edited some of her features so it didn't look exactly like her. I personally like soft colours and I was always going to include a range of them in the design. So I added layers of coral shades and worked on editing the light into some similar soft colours. We also went through a range of different ideas on text, fonts and layout ideas. In the end we settled on a less is more approach, just having the text being simple and centred to the image.

I work in graphic design so I worked this all out in Photoshop and it came together really quickly. I don't usually like my work and always have a voice in my head saying "you could have just done that little bit more” when I've finished something. However, I'm really happy with how the artwork turned out and we think it ties in with the content and messages featured in ‘Blossom’ nicely.