Identity · Art Direction
2025
A record label that sounds the way last light looks.
Alpenglow is an independent label releasing ambient and neo-classical records from a converted chapel outside Innsbruck. They came to us with thirty releases, no visual system, and a name that deserved better.
Scope
- Brand strategy
- Visual identity
- Generative sleeves
- Art direction
- Type direction
01 — The brief
Ambient music is invisible by design — the genre's visual culture defaults to blurry gradients and forgettable type. Alpenglow needed an identity with the discipline of a Swiss institution and the warmth of the phenomenon it's named after: the red glow that hits mountain faces after the sun has already set.
02 — The work
We built the system around a single gesture — the horizon. Every release gets a generative sunset composition, computed from the audio's spectral centroid: brighter records sit higher on the sleeve, darker ones sink. Fraunces carries the artist names with its optical size cranked to 144pt; Switzer handles catalogue numbers like a shipping manifest.
03 — The result
The first ten re-issued sleeves sold out in a weekend. The system now runs as a small tool the label operates without us — which was the point.
“They gave us a system that behaves like a label manager with impeccable taste and no opinions about the music.”
— Mira Holzer, founder
0
sleeves regenerated
0hrs
to first sell-out
0
gesture, everywhere
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