Designed for Montreal-based Petit Village Records, the album cover for Jon Sakata’s Hooray for the Status Quo explores the tension between order and disruption. The design process began as an extensive series of typographic and colour studies, testing grids, movement, abstraction, and legibility across multiple compositions.

Using cyan, magenta, and yellow as subtractive primary colours, typography becomes both language and graphic form—stretching, overlapping, dissolving, and occasionally resisting immediate recognition. Repeated matrix studies established a framework for experimentation, while individual compositions explored the typeface as line, movement, pattern, and image.

The work embraces discovery as part of the reading experience. What initially appears systematic gradually reveals a more restless visual language, allowing colour and typography to perform alongside the music. The result is an album cover that playfully celebrates the “status quo” by continuously questioning what that status might actually be.