Instinct Vol. 6
At least four times every year, Monstercat releases music compilations for its Uncaged and Instinct labels. These releases are major events within our community and require creative concepts flexible enough to span a variety of applications, including album art, animations, live events, and an entire apparel collection. To make things even more complicated, our in-house creative team was tasked with telling the origin story of our mascot, set on a mysterious island, using the album compilation events as the vehicle. I was responsible for the creative direction of the Instinct label and also for contributing to the storytelling and world building on a high level in collaboration with illustrators Amanda Cha and Kezrek Laczin.
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Album Artwork
Apparel Collection
Youtube Animations -
Art Direction
Illustration -
Animations by Lydia Pourmand
Photography by Lindsey Blaine
Apparel Graphic Placement by Linda Aristizabal
The Album Artwork
This artwork reveals the icy, mountainous region of the island featured in Monstercat's origin story. The lynx is one of the lost civilization's most prominent constellations in the night sky. Surrounding the lynx are constellations referencing the four supernatural monoliths built on the island, which are also major features of the storyline.
The Constellations
I designed ten constellations relevant to the storyline we had built: the four monoliths (original concept by Kezrek Laczin), the four animals which correspond to each monolith's biome, the eye (basically, "the north star") and the crab to reference Monstercat's internet-famous track, Crab Rave by Noisestorm. Our team then worked with a copywriter to write myths surrounding each constellation and had them printed with my celestial chart (see below).
Another exciting dimension to this project was the company's first foray into NFT art (Non-Fungible Tokens). We launched animated versions of the constellations as NFTs on Nifty Gateway and it was a huge success. The editions sold out in two minutes!
