How I Made Coldplay’s “Music of the Sphere” Tee
In the middle of September 2022, I saw an announcement that Coldplay would be broadcasting their live show from Buenos Aires on October 29th in cinemas. I was excited and asked my girlfriend to watch it with me. Long story short, we bought the tickets.
I want to wear a band tee to the show, but I don’t have one that resembles the band’s latest album, Music of the Spheres (abbreviated MotS). So, I asked myself, “Why don’t I create one?” I started looking for resources and found a picture on Coldpedia. I used the same font they used to promote the album’s lead single, “Higher Power,” called Kaotica. The picture below is my first design.
After giving it some more thought, I decided to scrap this draft for a few reasons. Firstly, the back cover resembles a backbone with a fart at the bottom (haha) and feels empty on the sides. Secondly, the important message of the album, “Everyone is an alien somewhere”, is written in Kaotican and may not be readable.
MotS is a unique album where each song has its own identity represented by celestial bodies such as planets, moons, and nebulae, each with a different glyph. This concept reminds me of Coldplay’s fifth album, Mylo Xyloto. I have a fan-made shirt that I bought in 2011, and when I looked at it, I thought, “This is it! I’m going to make one just like this!”.
I began to gather resources again and here’s what I got:
- Complete fan-made planet alphabets created by @C_ian_y on Twitter
- Coldplay rainbow logo, MotS font, album symbols in SVG, and few planets (Floris, Calypso, Epiphane, Kubik, and Neon Moon) from their world tour homepage.
For the rest of the planet pictures, I obtained the album’s high-quality artwork using my iTunes artwork finder app, then cut and upscaled each image using Upscayl, an open-source image upscaler software.
I sorted the planets in a 3-by-4 grid format based on the tracklist on the album. For each planet, I listed the corresponding song title in regular text, followed by the planet’s own glyph. This became the design for the back of the shirt.
For the front side, I used the concept from the previous draft, which is the message “Everyone is an alien somewhere”. However, this time I wrote it using the “Adobe Garamond Pro” font to match the album style and improve readability. It is accompanied by four album symbols: stars, a pyramid, an atom, and a spiral.
To complete the design, I created a MotS icon and placed it on the left sleeve. This strengthens the identity.
Long story short, I printed a shirt and wore it to the cinema. To make it more memorable, I also printed the back design as a poster and gave it away to some audiences. At first, some were hesitant, perhaps thinking that there were terms or conditions that must be met first. However, after explaining that it was completely free, they happily received it!
You can check out the design in detail on my Behance. Thank you for reading!
