When we look back on the summer of 2024, what will we see? Green.
Not just any green, but a shade so shocking that the fashion media described it as “noxious,” “abrasive,” and the color of “bilious sludge.” Imagine Gumby with jaundice. Imagine a Bottega Veneta handbag dipped in Nickelodeon slime.
The color entered the zeitgeist as the logo for “Brat,” the album released in early June by British pop provocateur Charli XCX. “It had to be really unsympathetic and uncool,” the singer said of the album cover, which features four blurry letters centered in a puke-green square.
But something strange happened: This deliberately repulsive color took over the Internet, then the summer, and then, at a crucial moment, an entire presidential campaign. In just a few days, supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, transformed chartreuse into a political symbol of unusual power.
Its online ubiquity makes last summer’s “Barbie” pink seem like a light suggestion.
Charli XCX was once reserved for the young and ironically tattooed; now, she is distributed to the general public. Last week, people who may have never heard of the singer listened to anchors from major American cable networks try to explain the sudden prevalence of this particular shade.
“I would aspire to be a Brat,” Jake Tapper told CNN’s correspondent, who was holding a slimy green meme printed on a piece of paper.
The color and typography of “Brat” now seem poised to become one of the enduring visual icons of this confounding moment in pop culture and politics. If Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster of Barack Obama was the enduring design of the 2008 election, the “Brat” album cover may well be its 2024 successor: a sincere, if slightly muted, red, white, and blue replaced by a distinctly unpatriotic and uncomfortable digital green.
“It’s a moment,” said Peter Saville, the designer responsible for the album covers of New Order and Joy Division that have become iconic of their era. “We’re talking about a temporary, self-contained moment in pop culture that suddenly fuels a political campaign, and a major political campaign, with global reach.”
What design choices got us here? In the following conversation, which has been edited and condensed, Brent David Freaney, the 39-year-old founder of Manhattan-based studio Special Offer, Inc., explained how he and a team that included art director Imogene Strauss created the design that has found its way into the public consciousness—and perhaps even the history books.
When “Brat” came out, I saw a lot of people joke that it was probably the easiest album cover to design. Something tells me that’s not the case.
No. We went through a five-month design process to get to where we got to. It was always text, always on a green square. Charli had compiled what she wanted and was like, “This is what I think it should be.” Honestly, as a designer, I was kind of like, OK?
The challenge was how to turn this thing into something special. It’s a surprisingly simple cover, of course, and I think that’s why it’s been recreated in so many different ways. As simple or effortless as it may seem at first glance, there’s a very deeply thought-out universe within it, which I think really legitimizes it from a design perspective.
Where did you start? Color?
We looked at about 500 different shades of green. The brief was: I don’t want this to look like it has a particular flavor. I want it to look off-putting and a little garish. Anything green I saw in the city, I started photographing. Whether it was a sign, a traffic cone, a car, the background of a picture in the New York Post. My boyfriend wants to kill me because I photograph everything I can find.
How did you make the final decision?
The final selection really came from an emotional feeling from Charli. It had to be something that captured the energy of the record that Charli had made, something that was very irreverent and that made you react, with the same retina-burning energy that a saturated red or a saturated orange might have. And it had to be something that couldn’t really be associated with anything else.
Where does typography come from? Is it literally Arial?
It had to feel like something that wasn’t precious. There are all these Swiss fonts, and as a designer, I’m always wondering how to beat Helvetica. We looked at so many different things, and it ended up being a combination, but the base is Arial. There’s a stretch to it, to give it personality. And it’s kind of awkwardly placed on the cover—it could have been really small and tasteful or really big and garish. So that it’s not one way or the other, it’s almost opinion-free, which I think is a really important part of the energy behind it.
It’s also blurry. Why?
I grew up in Mississippi, I was a queer, gay kid, I had no friends. I spent all my time on the computer, on early social networks like Live Journal and Myspace, where I would go to interact with people. These platforms used to work like this: you would get a 100px by 100px user icon that you could use. So the design of the blur came from the fact that we designed it at a really small scale and we just blew it up. We made it 100px by 100px, 72 ppi.
I remember that at first we were uncomfortable with the fact that the artwork looked unfinished. We had to tell the printers a thousand times: “This is how it should be.” They said: “This is not right, this is not right!”
When did you realize that it was starting to become more than just an album cover?
Actually, that’s what’s been happening for the last couple of weeks. The first week, I was like, is everyone kidding me? Oreo posted about it, and so did the MTA. My dad saw it on the local news, and he doesn’t listen to Charli XCX. The color saturation everywhere seems a little crazy.
Did you ever imagine that you would end up doing the de facto branding for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign?
I didn’t see that coming!
Why do you think this happened?
I think fan culture created and powered the internet. What creates a movement is when there are real people and they’re genuinely interested in something. There has to be someone on Kamala’s team who is a Charli fan. There’s this trend right now where we want to be excited about something, in this crazy, dystopian world that we live in.
Did the campaign contact you?
Nothing yet.
When we look back on this summer, what kind of energy do you think “Brat” green will represent?
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. There’s a certain irreverence to summer, and this sense of going crazy. I really hope that the legacy of the album, besides Charli XCX’s incredible music, is that it evokes a sense of freedom. I think the wave of green that’s taken over is because it’s a party and it feels wild. It’s not millennial pink. The energy behind it is alive.