Ashkan Khatibi

Ashkan Khatibi is a renowned Iranian artist, musician and actor. He engaged Roo studio to design a cover and artwork for a single that he intended to publish digitally. The song titled, “Cry Girl Cry” began with a slow tempo, progressively increasing to create a melancholic atmosphere imbued with perplexing thoughts, feelings of sadness, and rebellion while urging the female protagonist in the lyrics to break her silence and cry. Coming out at a time where a number of issues regarding women had surfaced in the media, the lyrics accompanied by energetic rock music, evoked feelings of power mixed with sadness and uncertainty in the minds of its audience.

Given the main message of the song, it was crucial for Roo Studio to not only illustrate what the song was about but to recreate the same sensations and expand on it.

We came up with a creative solution to include a female model on the cover and to also evoke the same feelings that the song did through our artwork. Since the song was to be widely released on social media and digital platforms, we also had to develop a concept that would be simply understood by a wide audience and grasped at a single glance.