Find Your @albumreceipts: Catching up with Melody Han You
Well well well, you’re the mastermind behind @albumreceipts. Can you tell us about what inspired this dope concept?
I was browsing through Reddit when I came across this brilliant album-turned-receipt concept, made by Pepe Yttrium. I thought that this was a super cool way to show what kind of music I’ve been listening to since being back home from college, so I decided to create my own version of album receipts from my personal favorite music albums.
After I posted 3 album receipt graphics on my personal IG account, which included IGOR, Astroworld, and Ginger a ton of my friends started asking me if I could make album receipts of their favorite albums – that’s when I had decided to launch an IG dedicated to album receipts.
Within less than 2 months, your following has grown over 110,000+ followers. Your work has also been shared and noticed by Ariana Grande, SZA, Teyana Taylor, Kacey Musgraves, GUNNA, Anderson .Paak and Carly Rae Jepsen. Did you believe all of this would happened so quickly?
Not at all! This all feels extremely surreal to me and I am so grateful for the overwhelming support and positive responses my work has been getting. I launched this account the day after I had completed college as a creative quarantine project, with no intention of making this go viral. Seeing so many people share and support my work means the world to me.
How did you get into design and where do you pull most inspiration?
I actually did not pursue design or art direction until this year, so I would say I’m still fairly new to the creative world. I was an advertising major at Boston University, where I studied account management and the client-side of things. After a few account and marketing-related internships, I found myself gravitating more towards the creative side of advertising and decided to completely switch my focus in my second semester of senior year.
I pull a lot of inspiration from creative accounts that I follow on Instagram, including @taxcollection, @creativereview, @tinycactus, @veryrealfantasy, @thefemalewarhol and @mindofbarbara. All their content is sick and I love going through their feeds. The list goes on and on!
@taxcollection is so dope! I see you’ve been involved on the UX side of things. How was your experience projects such as Burger King, Yula, Oatly and Lime?
The campaigns on my portfolio are all mock-campaigns, not real ones! I took a portfolio development class in college this semester, where we focused on fleshing out our advertising portfolios. We were given different prompts and challenges to creatively execute ad campaigns for companies. Those companies were just ones that I decided to work on as part of my projects and I had a blast working on them, because I had never ideated and executed a fully integrated mock campaign before. It was a challenging (but very fun) experience, because I basically had to teach myself a lot of creative software tools and try my best to make things look professional. So I’m super flattered that you think those were real campaigns!!
I love asking this question to all creatives. You identity as an Art Director / Marketer. Do peers or recruiters ever try to put you in a box as a UX Designer? Some of these titles / roles merge and mean similar things, but what holds the most weight in your opinion?
I’m not a UX designer and didn’t study UX design in college, but thank you for thinking that I was!! I strongly identify myself as a creative but I don’t want to put myself in a box, because I’m 22 and only started doing creative stuff about 6 months ago. I’m still actively trying to learn and absorb as much as I can about the world of design, because I definitely think there’s always room for improvement and I have a habit of being nit-picky with everything I make.
Tesla or Audi?
TESLA. I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk.
LV or Chanel?
Chanel!
Any new updates you’d like to leave us with?
I’m still working on more exciting content for a few record labels and artists that I’m a big fan of, so be sure to follow me at @albumreceipts and stay tuned!!
