Madonna Box Set: "Ray of Light"

This project began with research into the album's original art direction. I looked at many reference images and my own copies of the album on CD and vinyl. Over the years, "Ray of Light"'s re-pressings have skewed the colours in more red or green tones, so it was important to find the original editions and use them as my guides. The original artwork's use of star/sun symbols and thin white circle lines was carried across my design work.

Researching what Madonna's peers have produced in box sets, it was quickly obvious that few box sets focused on women. Many of the best box sets produced are by men and/or bands, and I am indebted to SuperDeluxeEdition.com for the hours of entertainment and incredible writing I found during my research. Some of my favourites (including those shown here) were produced by/for Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Danny Elfman, Charlie Chaplin, Elton John, Paul McCartney and George Michael. In Asia, K-Pop artists including BTS and Blackpink frequently release colourful, fun box sets at affordable prices for fans. The record label Mondo has always been an inspiration for me as well, and for "Ray of Light" I was directly inspired by their pressing of the "Aliens" soundtrack on liquid-filled vinyl. Their expansive reissues of soundtracks (including the "Batman Animated Series Volume 1" collection shown here) are collated with a strong eye toward a cohesive, appropriate design, and I was inspired to follow that approach with my work.

Mario Testino's 1997 untouched photoshoot for the album cover has long been available online via fan forums and social media groups. Given their age, the majority of available finished photos are scans from various print materials, many of which are incorrectly coloured or preserved, so my starting point were these original photos.

To begin re-building the album artwork from scratch, I chose Pantone 2234C as my primary colour. It was a close approximation of the original album artwork's overarching colour, and allowed me to keep everything looking cohesive across different artwork files and software.

The next step was re-creating the album's logo with a newly-drawn icon and using the original font, with some small adjustments to the kerning. For the box set's cover, I wanted the "expanded edition" logo to interfere with the original as little as possible. The final result incorporates the thin circle from the original CD's booklet artwork.

For the album cover, the original photo needed to be cropped of its photo negative frame first, retouched, and expanded. The original album cover has a stretched quality to the background that I wanted to avoid for this version. The new artwork incorporates more green tones than white, and the light reflections taper off towards the side.

The deluxe vinyl edition of "Ray of Light" in this box set, with newly created front-and-back album artwork. For the vinyl discs below, I was inspired by new technologies in record pressing. Given this album's watery imagery, it seemed appropriate to introduce the idea of a liquid-filled vinyl edition of "Ray of Light", directly inspired by (and with graphic elements borrowed from) Mondo's "Aliens Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" (Liquid Filled) 2XLP release. While this would be expensive for a widely-produced box set, it was something I wanted to experiment with.

As a large number of original un-retouched photos are available from Mario Testino's photo shoot, I used 12 of them as the artworks for the CD sleeves. Each photo was cropped, retouched, expanded (with the help of Adobe Photoshop's beta AI generation abilities at the time) and the circle / ray of light graphics were added. The light travels from the left to the right side of the image across the covers, to create a subtle connecting flow between them.

A card sleeve collection of discs will be the digital component of this release, including 10 CDs, a DVD and a Blu-Ray. The content would include the original remastered album with bonus tracks, remix edits, live tracks, demos, and a Blu-Ray and DVD audio set that remasters the complete album experience into Dolby Atmos with digitally re-scanned music videos and live performances. All six singles (including "Beautiful Stranger") are included with a CD each, featuring all official remixes on each disc, plus the remixes for promotional singles "Skin" and "Sky Fits Heaven".

To figure out the tracklists for the CDs, I had to search through Wikipedia articles, fan forums and websites to learn what demos existed, created by which producers and their rough chronological order of development. I then took their durations and used that to help organise the tracklists across a standard CD (74-80 minutes). Click the sleeves above for detailed views of each disc's contents.

"Ray of Light" was promoted with five singles, and the following year, the 1999 Grammy Award-winning "Beautiful Stranger" (from the film "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me") was also released. I thought it was best to include this single in this box set, given its writers/producers were still Madonna and William Orbit. At the time, the original single artworks were not available in high-resolution online, given their age. Rather than use scans of varying quality levels for this project, I re-created each single cover from scratch. This involved tracking down high-resolution photography, their original fonts, and re-drawing graphics to match the sources. In the graphic above, the top row are the Before images and the bottom row are my recreations.

"Each single recreation posed its own unique design challenges. For example, the "Beautiful Stranger" cover used a screencap from the original NTSC master of the music video, however it was stretched and skewed in a way that distorted her face. I used an HD remaster of the video for the new single, and only when I was laying it out did I notice the original cover designer had digitally removed her left bra strap so the black text would be visible against her skin - a small detail I had never noticed until I started working on this project.

The singles as coloured 7" vinyl, with new label designs and their re-created original single artworks.

A hardcover book would be included. The cover mirrors the layout of the original album artwork.

The book would focus on telling the complete story of the making of "Ray of Light".

Lithographs and a large poster are the final touches in this box set. The images chosen come from magazine photoshoots and music videos.

Beyond the box set itself, these items are concepts for a revamp of her online store, including some ideas for merchandise and ways to split up the different products, a Frozen t-shirt design, and a "Ray of Light" logo sterling silver ring.

An alternate album artwork vinyl concept, based on Madonna's "Frozen" music video.

This was conceived as a limited edition, online-exclusive release of the vinyl. The artwork mirrors the album artwork, but uses a still image from her "Frozen" music video with some edits to her dress and posture. The vinyl itself would have black liquid inside the dark blue discs.

This was a concept for a Record Store Day limited release of the album using the second photoshoot setup by Mario Testino. This cover image was used for the "Frozen" single artwork. This edition uses oranges and caramel colours in the liquid-filled vinyl, for a warmer and sunnier variation of "Ray of Light".

The box itself is heavily inspired by the original special edition of the album, which featured a holographic cover designed to replicate the album artwork's jacket and overall water imagery, which, at the 41st Annual Grammy Awards (1998), won the award for Best Recording Package for designer Kevin Reagan. My design takes the same approach and adds a new "expanded edition" logo to the cover in embossed silver. In a physical print, this would be a hologram, but digitally it can be applied as anything from animated album artwork in Apple Music to lyric videos/visualisers and social media content.