Daks : Who were your favourite artists to work with? Do you have a favorite cover/CD package that you are most proud of? Peploe : I’ve always found it hard to choose favourite projects. Probably my favorite cover was Fergie’s The Duchess. We created that campaign to reflect 1960’s French movie posters and much of it I hand- painted, which I loved. That being said, the real achievement for a music packaging designer is getting a good idea through the mill without all the edges coming off by appealing to the lowest common denominator. The bigger the artist, the greater the risk of compromise.
As a result, the visual arc I created for Jennifer Lopez over the years was probably one of my most exciting challenges. First, we needed to create a separate identity from Jennifer’s movie career and then, from album to album, we strove to tell new stories, create new characters, reveal different aspects, and create new worlds. Daks : Obviously, with digital downloading and streaming, the whole music industry changed. Covers became much less important. Is that why you decided to leave Sony? Peploe : I actually left Sony right before the digital download revolution. I had landed myself the Creative Director position for Epic Records but found that most of my time was spent negotiating between the creative team and the record label and not designing myself. So in the late summer of 2001, I decided to leave and start my own design firm. This allowed me the opportunity to work in a wider range of fields including publishing, corporate branding, and other record labels. Daks : How did the idea of Sawyer and Stone come about? Peploe : Sometime around 2010, I had an ‘Aha!’ moment when a friend in marketing explained to me that I was lucky because I was a content creator. I think I had been so focused up until then on solving visual problems for my clients that I lost sight of the fact that I “make” or “create.” I had become part of the service industry.
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