Cheap wine, cereal and a made-up evil megacorp: The story of Arcade Fire's Juno-nominated album art

Every corporation employs a team. The same goes for the imaginary ones. So when Catherine Lepage and Simon Rivest saw "Money + Love" last week — Arcade Fire's new two-for-one music video — the Montreal art directors could spot their contributions all over it.

The short, directed by David Wilson, stars Toni Collette as the cartoonishly sinister CEO of the Everything Now Corp., a conglomerate that's bought the band's contract, forcing them to shill cars and junk cereal along with the music. That story, plus all the products and packaging associated with EN Corp., have figured in every element of the album's roll-out, from music videos to dummy Twitter accounts — to the album artwork. Designed by Lepage and Rivest, it's up for a Juno Award this year — one of the band's five nominations going into the March 25 show.

The art directors walked CBC Arts through the process.

Arcade Fire calling             

Rewind to 2017. "Exactly a year ago," says Rivest.

"We were approached by the band at the same time they approached JR for the cover installation," he explains. (That French artist, perhaps best known for his global street art project Inside Out, created the trompe l'oeil billboard that's splashed on the cover, but more on that in a minute.)

From first contact, Rivest says that nearly everything about Everything Now was already mapped out by the band, and he and Lepage were supplied with a detailed brief, Win and Régine's wish list for the album package.

"This idea of the Everything Now Corporation owning Arcade Fire" — that was all them. "And having all those songs being products, and having their own logos? They really came up with that idea first," he says.

How'd they land it?

Both art directors are working artists. Lepage is an author and illustrator with an NFB film in development and Rivest is the co-founder of artist collective Doyon-Rivest, but they're also the founders of an award-winning design studio called Ping Pong Ping.

Among their clients is Kanpe, a non-profit co-founded by Arcade Fire's Régine Chassagne to help families in Haiti. Ping Pong Ping designed the foundation's corporate identity. That's their connection to the band, Rivest says. Still, being recruited for the Everything Now assignment was a surprise, he says, though the duo were uniquely suited for the job.

"The briefing for Everything Now was really corporate," says Lepage, and that posed a challenge when it came to representing what the band's about. "They always had a feeling in their artwork that was 'artsy,'" she says, reflecting on every Arcade Fire album that had come before, right back to the scratchy, silkscreened look of Funeral. "I was wondering how we would make that make sense with their legacy."

Both she and Rivest had put in some time at ad agencies back in the early days of their careers, satisfying mega-chain clients. "We can connect to that," she says. "We know how to work that way." Would delivering design work to the totally fictional Everything Now Corp. be any different?

To see how they mixed a little bit of Arcade Fire's DIY-loving character in with Everything Now's commercial vibe, take a closer look at how all song logos are printed — not just throughout the album artwork, but in music videos, merch, you name it. Sometimes, the branding appears hard and clean — just like a regular corporate logo. Other times, it's "distressed" to hint at "the band's universe," says Rivest.

The logos

Is there anything special about designing a logo for a song?

"It's kind of the same, but different," says Rivest.

"Every logo was a different briefing," he continues. There'd be some "vague" notes on the song and the general desired tone — "more commercial, more artsy," says Lepage, by way of example. Plus, there was always a pitch for a tie-in product.

"Creature Comfort" is probably the most recognizable example. The song doubles as an all-marshmallow breakfast cereal, and the band sent fans on a scavenger hunt last June for that particular item. Real boxes were hidden on store shelves as part of a social media campaign for the single.

Part of the brief, though, was to make sure everything seemed just a little bit off. Says Rivest: "We were looking at [making] something corporate, but corporate in a way that's not the coolest."

"We used really shitty fonts, if you look at it," he says, pointing to the logo for "We Don't Deserve Love." On the lyric sheet, which is designed to look like a grocery flyer, "We Don't Deserve Love" is a brand of six dollar plonk.

"It had to look like cheap white wine," says Lepage of the logo.

"We don't get briefings like that very often in real life," laughs Rivest.

"Or sugary cereal!" adds Lepage. "We don't work in that field, you know."

Brief first, music later

But they do work with musicians plenty, and on that front, one thing was unusual about this assignment — at least at first. It was months before they got to hear the record.

"Oh my god! We were too shy to ask!" says Lepage, laughing. "I think it was two months after we started working on the project and at that point I asked, I took all my courage and I asked."

"The pace was so fast at the beginning. We really were in deep right at the beginning, so we didn't really ask because we knew they were in the studio," says Rivest. "We understand the feeling that maybe they're not ready [to share the tracks]."

While they waited, they at least had the lyrics. Says Rivest: "The first time [we listened to Everything Now] we were able to sing every word to every song because we saw the words so much."

"It's a weird way to work but at the same time it was magic to hear the album for the first time," says Lepage. "We were so excited and thrilled to hear it."

What about JR?

Delayed album delivery aside, the duo say they were always in communication with the band — emailing links and images and ideas back and forth. But they say that JR was never part of the thread.

• Watch: JR turns Toronto's Nuit Blanche Inside Out

While Rivest and Lepage were fine-tuning the album's graphic design  — and possibly branded coffee mugs and paper clips and lanyards, too  — his team was working on a parallel assignment.

In May 2016, JR unveiled a new outdoor installation at the Louvre, and Arcade Fire's Butler and Chassagne played a show in the nearby Jardin des Tuileries to mark the occasion, wrapping the set by hopping into a park pond with the artist himself. A year later, they'd tap JR for another surprise stunt.

To announce the arrival of Everything Now — plus its eponymous lead single — the band launched a livestream last June. "Live from Death Valley," the feed offered nothing but a live eye on JR's latest installation, a mountain-shaped billboard that blended into the actual hills like a wheatpaste and scaffolding chameleon.

It's also, of course, the picture on the front of the record.

Rivest and Lepage were kept in the loop on the installation's progress, and they were involved in certain details that would be important to the final album design — selecting the font for the billboard's LED ticker, for example.

They had no communication with JR himself, they say, but the artist gave them total freedom when it came to how the installation appears in the album artwork.

They were sent "something like 2,000 pictures" of the billboard — raw photos, taken by JR. "I'm not used to that. Most of the time, photographers want to control the image," says Lepage. "I don't know why, but JR sent us the hard drive and trusted whatever the decision would be."

"We didn't meet him. We never had feedback on the Photoshop, or if he didn't like it," she says.

"Maybe he does not exist at all," jokes Rivest.

Choosing the cover...and then another and another and another

With thousands of images to work with, Rivest says "it was hard to make a choice." But then, Everything Now required seemingly endless iterations on its design.

The album is a collector's dream — or nightmare, depending on their budget. If we're just talking about the vinyl offerings alone, there are 20 limited edition "language" versions of the LP available. In each one, the billboard reads "Everything Now" in a different language, from French to Bengali to Vietnamese, and the cover photo is given a unique treatment.

Plus, you can find the LP in a "Day" or "Night" variant, with the daytime photo being the "official" look.  According to Rivest, those pressings exist because nobody could choose which one they liked best, tbh.

Infinite Arcade Fire content

Says Rivest: "We have two versions of the vinyl, two versions of the CD and we have a cassette that is different, a different point of view for the billboards. It was, yeah — kind of a challenge to manage."

"And then there's the products, too," he says.

"Cereal! Cereal boxes and energy drink," says Lepage.

"Even wine. We have a bottle right here!" says Rivest.

"In 2018, it's always much more than an album design. It's more of a platform, let's say, that we need to use in various contexts. This time, honestly, it went beyond what we thought at the beginning because it turned out to [include] merch; it turned out to be onstage design somehow."

"We're nominated for an album, but it's much more than that."

Watch the Juno Awards Sunday, March 25 on CBC. Visit CBC Music for complete info on how to catch the show.