Rilo Kiley — The Execution of All Things: Album Artwork Rework in Adobe Photoshop
This project reimagined the original album artwork for Rilo Kiley's The Execution of All Things through a postmodern visual lens — while preserving the emotional core Jenny Lewis embedded in the writing. The challenge was not to replace the album's feeling, but to find a new visual language that could carry it: one built on fragmentation, irony, layered meaning, and the tension between sincerity and distance that defines so much of postmodern art.
The project began with research into two parallel worlds: Jenny Lewis's lyrical themes of mortality, disillusionment, and quiet Americana heartbreak in The Execution of All Things, and the visual and philosophical language of postmodernism, drawing from designers and artists who use fragmentation, appropriation, and layered meaning to destabilize surface beauty. From that research, a mind matrix was built to surface unexpected connections between the album's emotional register and postmodern visual strategies, mapping where Lewis's sincerity and postmodernism's ironic distance weren't opposites but mirrors of each other.
From there, I began sketching and evolving the design to interpret the feeling of layered fragmentation at the heart of the music, evoking a memory rising to the surface when a smell, a sound, or a place pulls you back to childhood.
That feeling guided every stage, from initial sketches through comps and super comps, each iteration refining the idea until the final design struck a balance between postmodern visual language and the raw emotional honesty Jenny Lewis brought to every lyric.
