Nina Simone
Day 12
#93 – Eunice Kathleen Waymon (1933–2003), better known by her stage name Nina Simone. American singer, pianist, songwriter, arranger, and civil rights activist, widely associated with jazz music. Recordings include: I Loves You, Porgy (1958), My Baby Just Cares for Me (from the album Little Girl Blue, 1968) and the album Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967).
As the fight for racial equality grew in America in the mid-1960s, so Simone started to address the issues through her music, writing songs such as “Mississippi Goddam” and “Young, Gifted and Black”. As this was important in her life I decided to try and work that into the idea, through the use of handwriting and the use of black and white. Splitting the page expressed the idea of equality. I started by just splitting down the middle, but when she started it wasn’t equal, so that led to the idea of an unequal split. When I tried it with her whole name, I realised the split could be the ‘e’ of Simone. An ‘e’ for ‘equality’.
2 hours
Many of the early ideas used handwriting to introduce energy and a more personal feeling in the design
Listen...
to excerpts from ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’.