Lisa Ono Best

Develop packaging for a classmate’s favorite album, selected at random. After immersing oneself in the music and the artist’s history and personal style, design an appropriate solution, including cover and lyric booklet. Use the original liner note content and augment as necessary. 

LISA ONO BEST is a greatest hits compilation for the popular Japanese-Brazilian bossa nova singer. The CD digipak comes with a 44pp booklet.

Identity + Mark  |  Illustration  |  Packaging  |  Editorial Design + Layout  |  Copy Writing + Editing 

Much like a client project, I didn’t know anything about Lisa Ono—Japan’s best-selling bossa nova artist—when I was assigned her album, so I set to work doing some research. As it turns out, she is a fascinating character. Born in Brazil to Japanese parents, Lisa moved back to Tokyo when she was ten years old, and every year since she has spent half her time in Japan and half in Rio. She’s Asian yet sings in flawless Portuguese. On both sides of the Pacific, she’s considered a native. 

My concept for this CD package was to tell the story of Lisa Ono’s unique Latin-Asian heritage through the metaphorical journey of a crate across the Pacific Ocean. Just as she travelled from her birthplace in Brazil back to the Japan of her family, her music made the trip as well. 

A greatest hits package is essentially a gift to fans, a treasure trove supplemented with rarities collected and presented as testament to a musician’s legacy. I took this notion literally, and envisioned a crate washing up on the shores of Japan from Brazil, filled with ephemera. Inside is a ‘message in a bottle’ containing song lyrics and scraps of inspiration in the form of photographs, postcards and letters. 

I designed each spread in a collaged format, as if the listener had discovered the crate and began spreading its contents out upon the sand. 

For the track list and fine print on the album cover itself, I settled on Avant Garde. The Lisa Ono wordmark is based on Holly Goldsmith's Bossa Nova lettering, which is derived from hand lettering found in a 1946 copybook. Finally, I set all of the lyric content in the booklet in Garret Boge's Wendy, which is based on authentic 1960s script samples.

The supporting color palette comes directly from the digital photographic composition on the cover. I decided to use the deep ocean blue in a lighter tint for the full moon image on the compact disc itself.