Hardformat

Ukraine-based Kateryna Zavoloka is both designer and musician. Her designs are strikingly attractive, ranging from monochromatic to richly colourful. Refusing to be restricted to the standard square/rectangle, Viter extends upwards to a delightful curve while Sturquen’s Piranha ends in a series of suggestive peaks. Viter is also die-cut, its curves and rich yellow and blue embody the phrase picked out on the reverse ‘To inbreathe clear air and warm wind’. Wag The Swing and Revolt are embossed with metallic inks that catch the light. These designs articulate electronic music in ways that diverge significantly from West European and North American design approaches to electronic music.

Dmytro Fedorenko writes:

When in 2006 I was meditating about opening a new label, I was thinking of doing something radical and extremely personal. As much as possible. Radical not in terms of loudness, or shocking designs, or some kind of provocations, but rather as a way of being in a process of building something very unique and, maybe, inner challenging. The idea was not to concentrate on such things as “sound”, or “style”, or “genre”, but to do each new object as something extra special, even if one object may sound or look way different from another. From one hand Kvitnu is, first of all, a music label of course. And each our project always starts with the music. But, as I still believe in presentation of music with physical media, I decided that our cover designs must look as absolutely equal part of each release. Non-compromise maybe. With a big respect to our music and trying to create a complete art object.

Zavoloka writes:

Zavoloka “Viter”
The idea of this design came to me, when I was playing concert on the EME festival in Portugal. This festival was in the old castle Igreja de Santiago de Palmela, which is stands on the mountain, and from there was very beautiful view to the sea and sky. This package is inspired by this evening sky, with strong contrast of yellow and deep blue. Lines are just hint about moving of air and the package consist of two components, the yellow one can be seen through blue cardboard. The title of the album “Viter” means “Wind” in Ukrainian and this work was dedicated to Purification by Air Element, the first one in the series.

Kotra & Zavoloka “Wag The Swing”
This concept was based on the swinging and moving of abstract simple shapes with bright, strong colours and golden foil which represents the concept of the music. I wanted this graphic to be structured and distorted in the same time. Me and Kotra were fighting and arguing a lot about this package, but in the end I think it is the most beautiful release from Kvitnu.

Kotra “Revolt”
This work is about internal revolution and light. The circle is a symbol of Sun. Red, red foil. I was inspired by Trypillian ancient ritual symbols, that people draw on ceramics. This package is like totem.

v4w.enko “Harmonic Ratio”
The idea was to transmit strong graphics from V4w.enko into 3 dimensions, to add texture and shape to 2d graphics. We used matt cardboard and black foil stamping, special die cut with other secret ingredients, to add the warm physical feeling into cold abstract b/w graphics.

Sturqen “Piranha”
This package was designed in collaboration with Sturqen. The die cut and graphics are based on a pure abstract and sharp forms, depth in shape and in color.