Mary Banas on designing album covers for Mitski that live up to her sound

Prior to the release of Be The Cowboy, the iconic American singer and songwriter Mitski had designed all of her own album covers, proving her mastery of creative mediums beyond just music. But during the development of this 2018 album, she received an email from Rhode Island-based designer Mary Banas, who was getting in touch to offer her design skills, on the off-chance that Mitski would be interested. It turns out she was, and after working together on the cover for Be The Cowboy, the pair began a creative partnership that has stood the test of time.

“I am really lucky to collaborate with Mitski because she has great respect for the creative process,” says Mary. “Collaboration across disciplines is special, because of that relationship of mutual admiration and understanding.” At the time of writing, Mary has worked on three of Mitski’s albums, including Laurel Hell, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, which came out just last year. Their bond is a special one, with Mary explaining that they are “interested in making art that can amplify and expand upon the music”.

Their collaborative process usually begins with a sustained period of seclusion, during which time the pair brainstorm ideas and begin to chip away at the design – before the marketing team gets their hands on it. Images that have been shot for the album, as well as the music itself, serve as jumping-off points for Mary, who works with Mitski to develop a cover artwork that enhances the album’s sonic offerings. For Mary, it is important that during this process she doesn’t “centre the design (or the designer), but rather lets the design function as another gesture of the music”.

Looking through Mitski’s album catalogue, it’s clear that typography plays a big part in the design concept for the covers, and Mary confirms this: “Typography is vital to any design project – it is a form that communicates, in addition to the language it makes.” Indeed, where album covers are concerned, the aesthetic of the type is arguably more important than the words it represents, and across the three albums that Mary has worked on, this consideration is evident. On Be The Cowboy, for instance, Mary extensively researched movie title sequences, to find a typeface that matched up to the cinematic moodboard Mitski has provided. She landed on Steelfish by Typodermic, a sans serif reminiscent of the densely laid out credits at the bottom of old movie posters, and Calafia by Neil Secretario, which nods to the design conventions of film noir. “Calafia outlined [also] functions as a ‘veil’ on the cover, that the subject is looking through,” adds Mary. “I was thinking about the gaze, the viewer, the audience, and stardom itself.”

Similar attention was paid to the typography on The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, which features a barely legible typeface by Plain Form called Ready Active. Hoping to rebel against the “clean sans serif fonts found on digital platforms”, Mary chose this typeface for its unruly forms and unwillingness to be easily read. In fact, she says Ready Active is meant to serve more as an image, than to convey a piece of text. “I wanted to express the idea of ‘unruly and free’, like the idea of the American Old West… Ready Active fit my vision, and I chose to further that notion by allowing it to break the border of the image in the design.”

Of course, beyond creating something that Mitski will love, Mary also designs for the fans, and she notes that this aspect of the work is one of the most rewarding. “Mitski’s fanbase are the nicest and most thoughtful group of people, and they have expressed appreciation for most things in the Mitski universe. I am always thinking of them when I design and I aim to delight them with work that reflects the depth of the art Mitski creates.”