Cocteau Twins — Abby Lee

11.25" × 16.50"
30lb newsprint
Printed at Linco Printing in Long Island City, NY

Using the essay “Cocteau Twins, Young Thug, and the Incoherent Beauty of Life” written by Asher White, I designed this 4-page newsprint, typset the essay, and played with the connections and culutral callouts in White’s piece to create a visual mapping of references.

The cover uses a text to image script, comprised of lyrics from over 80 Cocteau Twins songs.

Elizabeth Fraser, the songwriter and lyricist of the band, is famously known for somewhat unintelligable lyrics. She has said,

“Fortunately [the nonsensical words] come out making a sort of sense. They make enough sense to other people for them to actually… they can understand, they can see things, they have these mental pictures… [Fans’] interpretations are so beautiful that sometimes I have preferred what they have written to what I actually sang, it has been much more eloquent.”

As a fan with my own lyrical inventions for countless songs, and access to multiple archives of other fans’ transcriptions, I took one song and paired my version with another fans’ version. I used typographic interventions (underlining, different colors) to mark where our transcriptions were the same, where they were different, and timestamped the lines with subscript.

Abby is a graphic designer and artist based in New York with particular interests in branding & identities, print & editorial, web design,and experiential design.

Pratt Institute Communications Design MFA Instructor: Scott Vander Zee

Pratt Institute
Communications Design MFA
Instructor: Scott Vander Zee