Designer Brent David Freaney is sharing the inspiration behind Charli XCX‘s viral cover art for her celebrated breakthrough album, Brat – and the months-long process it took to perfect it.
“We went through a five-month-long design process to get to where we arrived. It was always text, always on a green square,” Freaney, 39, explained to the New York Times in an interview published on Friday, July 26. “Charli had comped up what she wanted and was like, ‘This is what I think it should be.’ Truthfully, as a designer, I was a little bit like: OK?”
Freaney, who is the founder of Manhattan-based studio Special Offer Inc., went on to tell the outlet that the seemingly simple design was a challenge for him and his team.
“The challenge became — how do I take this thing and make it something that is special?” he continued. “It’s a painfully simple cover, obviously, and I think that lends itself to the reason it’s been recreated in so many different ways. As easy or effortless as it may seem on its face, there is a very deeply considered world in it, that I think really legitimizes it from a design perspective.”
Part of that process, Freaney explained to the Times, was combing through “500 different shades of green” and looking for inspiration everywhere – even in the mundane moments of everyday life.
“The directive was: I don’t want this to feel like it has any taste. I want it to feel off-putting and kind of garish,” Freaney said. “Everything I started seeing in the city that was green, I started taking a photo of. If it was a sign, a traffic cone, a car, the background of an image in The New York Post.”
Charli, 31, ended up making the “final selection” of color based on an “emotional feeling,” Freaney revealed.
He added, “It needed to be something that captured the energy of the record that Charli had made, something that felt very irreverent and in your face, with the same retina-burning energy that a saturated red or a saturated orange would have. And it needed to be something that couldn’t really be associated with anything else.”
As far as the typography goes, Freaney said the font needed to “feel like something that wasn’t precious.”
“We looked at so many different things, and it ended up being a combination, but the base of it is Arial,” he said. “There’s a stretch to it, to give it a personality. And it’s kind of awkwardly placed on the cover — it could have been very small and tasteful or very large and loud. To have it not go one way or the other, it’s almost opinion-less, which I think is a really important part of the energy behind it.”
The slight blurriness of the font is also an homage to early social media networks like LiveJournal and MySpace.
“The way those platforms used to work is you would get a 100 pixel by 100 pixel user icon that you could use. So the design of the blur came from designing it at a really small scale and just blowing it up,” Freaney told the outlet. “I remember, as we were kind of getting into it, being uncomfortable with how unfinished the artwork felt. We have had to tell printers a thousand times, ‘This is the way it’s supposed to look.’ They’re like, this isn’t right, this isn’t right!”
While “brat green” is undoubtedly the color of the summer, Freaney said he hopes that the color will come to represent the “feeling of freedom.”
“I think the wave of green that has sort of taken over is because it’s a party and it feels wild,” he said. “This is not millennial pink. The energy behind it is alive.”
Charli first announced her sixth studio album in February, and dropped Brat in June. Upon its release, Brat became the highest-charting album of her career, debuting at No. 3 on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart and No. 2 on the UK Albums Chart behind Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department.
The critically acclaimed album, which is considered her long-awaited mainstream breakthrough, also inspired the fashion trend “Brat Girl Summer” as the cover art and multiple songs went viral last month.
“Thank you so much for all the love and support you have all shown for this music, this campaign and for me,” she wrote via Instagram, adding, “At my most pure, my most Charli, my most brat.”
