|
RICE-momoya honestly have NEVER been that good. Ayu's CD designs have almost universally been disappointing for me across the board, if I'm being entirely honest. Their work (at least for ayu) has always tended to be amateurish or dull or uncreative or tacky. It's always had at least one HUGE thing wrong with it. But lately, to say that their work has been bad is an understatement. I have no idea what happened, if they're taking on interns to do Ayu CDs or what, But S/S~LiA~ did things that even freshman art students would simply NEVER do. EVER. Ridiculous text placement, lazy cropping of the photo, the over-retouching of ayu's face... it was all awful, and it reeked of upstart student trying to prove how awesome they are and failing miserably.
Arguably the trouble started with GUILTY. The photos were admittedly probably difficult to work with, but there was no coherence to the album booklet's design, alot of what they did was cheap and shoddy and poorly put-together and the text was VERY hard to read (previous albums, especially MY STORY and RAINBOW, had issues with this as well - especially the credits page x_x). That sort of thing is REALLY basic - and before you ask, yes, I could probably do better. So could alot of the amateur designers (or if there are any other professionals here) who post fan works at this very forum.
Ayu gave them multiple chances to redeem themselves, probably too many. Mirrorcle World's photos were overexposed (I guarantee Shimomura didn't take them to look like that), A COMPLETE was dull, Days had the same issue as MW with the photos PLUS the added issue of white on light pink somehow being readable to the designer ("Far away" and "Moments" both had this issue back in the day as well... overall the folks at momoya are NOT good typographers). Rule wasn't bad, boring font (again, typography = no for those people) but the art direction and coloring was pretty good aside from the Ayu-goku drawing not really matching. NEXT LEVEL followed in that vein, so overall it wasn't bad either, just kinda messy.
Then S/S was the last straw, after multiple extreme failures and only, let's face it, "meh" performance before that.
(In my opinion, the best graphic designer Ayu ever had was Michiho Ogasawara, with RICE, who designed everything for the LOVEppears era. Good use of Helvetica, which isn't easy, some creative font treatments, different types of colors and layouts... quite talented, IMHO)
But yeah, amana had been doing CG treatment on ayu's covers for awhile (that term could cover soooo many things, so I'm not sure what it is exactly that they were doing), so it seems she went with them for the actual design work. Shinichi Hara is hopefully out of the picture, because his team had only ever been so-so at best, and lately they really were making things look awful.
I also think it was them the whole time, not Shimoko, making ayu's photos look terrible. Shimoko has taken some AMAZING photos of ayu over the years, including the "You were" covers. It's possible his personal photoshop team sucked horribly, but either way, it wasn't the photos, it was the treatment of them, and after seeing how "You were" turned out, I'm fairly certain of that. (That said, he should only ever do art direction for videos - directing human movement is NOT a strong point for him, but colors and cinematography DEFINITELY are.)
|