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Graphic Designer Emy Storey Brings Art to Music

If you own Melissa Ferrick’s In the Eyes of Strangers, Rachel Cantu’s Run All Night, or a Tegan and Sara T-shirt, then you own a piece of Emy Storey’s work. The lesbian artist has worked on album art, merchandise and advertisements for several artists, including designing Death Cab For Cutie’s latest best-selling album, Narrow Stairs.

“I was always really interested in art and making things,” Storey said. “I would be obsessing over the layout of my term papers [in college]. When I look back on some of the papers I wrote, I would spend more time designing a cover and illustration that had nothing to do with my report whatsoever. It just sort of hit me once I came to school that I’m choosing a career.”

While at school at Montreal’s Concordia University, Storey developed her own style, which emerged in her first post-college project: designing for Tegan and Sara. Since 2003, she’s served as the band’s creative director. She has toured with them several times, meeting fans to find out what they’d want to buy in the merchandise lines with each new release.

From her work with the duo, she was able to get hired on for other projects, and she also managed to build a fan base of her own. Storey was Sara’s girlfriend for several years, which put Storey in the position to become close to the band and the fans, and gave her an advantage when it came to creating designs both would find pleasing and representative of the music.

“The merchandise was such a blossoming and organic part of the business,” Storey said. “The fans enjoy the [merchandise], and they’re so wonderful, and we try to give them what they want and think of things for them to buy. If we had really boring shirts, I’m sure we wouldn’t sell half as many. When I first started selling merch with them, I was obsessed with it. I built elaborate displays and lights and got to know a lot of the fans that way and see what they were looking for … It was a really interesting opportunity, I felt like, that only me – and by me I mean someone really close to them – was able to bring to the job because I had so much to put into it.”

Despite spending half of her time designing T-shirts, scarves and sweatshirts for musicians, Storey’s favorite part of her job is putting together album artwork.

“I just feel like album artwork has the potential to be so creative and intelligent if you want it to be,” Storey said. “Not everybody’s looking for that kind of thing because everybody has different tastes. It’s really a client/designer relationship, and you have to respond to each client differently. They’re going to look at your design and say, ‘No this isn’t our style,’ or ‘We should put these colors,’ or ‘We don’t like this, we don’t like that.'”

Trying to artistically represent a body of music is also a challenge because, “you’ve got to take that and try to understand their concepts and their messages and come up with something really intelligent to portray it all visually.”

Storey said she likes to brainstorm for weeks, coming up with around 20 different concepts and pieces to bring to her clients.

“Usually I’ll just shut myself in,” she said. “During that time, I’m the most creative and coming up with themes and concepts that I then use again and again in their merchandise or other artwork for the duration of the album cycle. I always do a lot during that time.”

To date, Storey’s work on Death Cab for Cutie’s major album release has been her biggest, as half a million copies were produced for initial sale.

“It was so exciting,” she said. “The booklet itself was layered with pages of different lengths. It was a nontraditional way to make a booklet for a jewel case, so they sent me to Louisville, Kentucky, to the plant to see it get made and give the final go-ahead.”

Her most personal work, though, comes through working with Tegan and Sara.

“I feel like I have an understanding of their music that goes beyond my understanding of other people’s music,” Storey said, “because of how I’ve been involved in the past and to this day still in their musical process, hearing the music from the very day it’s written to the day it’s mastered for the record, being so familiar with the music and so familiar with them as people and what they want and appreciate visually and that kind of stuff. I would say that makes it really exciting, though I’m not sure about easy because they’ve always challenged me to keep working on things and developing ideas. They’re great to collaborate with, and the way we work has really grown and changed over the years.

“I feel like they give me a lot more freedom now. In the past I’d be working on something and Sara would pull up a chair right behind me at the computer and watch me work for an hour like she was watching TV or something. Now I’m kind of on my own doing my own thing, and they really trust me with that. So I don’t know if the trust factor makes it easy.

But say I get another random client who doesn’t know what they want or doesn’t know anything about design or [doesn’t] even really think about it all that much. They just say, ‘I need album art work, here are my lyrics and here’s the music.’ Sometimes I come up with something, and they take the first thing and it’s done. They make it easy, you know? But that never seems as satisfying for me.”

Now that she’s no longer on the road with Tegan and Sara (she has ended the relationship with Sara and has trained someone else to work with the merchandise), Storey has continued to serve as creative director for them while also working on other projects. Most recently, her projects include work with nonprofits like Project 10, a Montreal-based LGBTQ youth organization.

Storey said she works largely with gay organizations and artists “because I’m gay, so [they] find me by word of mouth. I think it’s been great for me, because personally I love to be able to help out my friends, and I think they’re all amazing artists. I’ve been really fortunate to work with so many amazing queer artists and to collaborate with them. I love working with gay people!”

One thing Storey will also be able to do is concentrate on her own work, which she sells on her website, eestorey.com. In her personal store, she sells designs for T-shirts, prints, books and pillowcases. Her work sells out quickly, and has created more work than she was prepared for.

“The schedule is so unpredictable, and it’s just constant, constant working” Storey said. “Working for myself is wonderful, and I feel so privileged to be able to do it and make a living. I know a lot of artists can’t do that because it’s hard to get a break to build your career that way, but it takes a lot of self-motivating and self-discipline.”

Given Storey’s work ethic, it appears she should have no problem.

Check out Storey’s designs at eestorey.com

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