Boneshaker is the culmination of nearly 8 years of musical evolution behind the Pollux & Castor catalog.  The brand's incubation period of developing music in all styles and experimentation early on - without releasing anything, allowed for the development of a solid brand strategy that just require proper execution once the publishing phase began.

Boneshaker is one of the earlier songs in the back-catalog, and thus more traditionally hip-hop oriented.  Following that orientation, I decided to focus on more of the oldschool staples of hip-hop's prime defining aesthetics that also reinforce the message in the song: hip-hop had become all about bravado, and shallow wordplay hyping up the rapper's ego.

This required me to take more of an art-director role and seek funding for hiring the right artist to design the elements we needed.

Once the art assets were designed, I developed all of the website, motion video, and branding content to support the song's push.

Luckily, we already had an archive of home-made video content I could pull from to develop a youtube release campaign that coincided with all of the major outlet releases, including the music visualizer above.

For the album artwork, we leveraged 99Designs to host an artwork contest in order to leverage the interactivity and community engagement while building a following for the music brand.

In the end, the selected artist made it through with a strong design from the initial entries on through the finalists round and even doing one final, minor revision for final deliveries.

The artist, Pavel, designed the album cover artwork and title designs:

We then worked with him 1:1 in order to develop Pollux' character design:

As well as reposing Castor:

All of the designs were vector-based and done in Illustrator so that we could easily reuse and recycle elements for various formats.

From here, multiple variations of the logo and characters were developed for all of the media sites we could implement banners on, including Facebook, Youtube, Google Play Music, iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Patreon, Twitter, Instagram, and the website.

The goal with Pollux & Castor's release schedule was to redesign the landing page with each announcement to reflect the change in branding - a staggered release between Electronic music releases and traditional Hip-Hop with clear color schemes and style/aesthetic would match each release type to shock the followers with the divergence, and slowly start to merge as the releases flowing out in the future begin to merge the two styles into a more unique, cohesive, singular genre over time.