Interactive – “Forever Young” single cover

“Forever Young” by the group Interactive is an anthem of happy hardcore and trance. The sound is based on a sample of Alphaville’s “Forever Young”. Interactive has defined hardcore and electronic music in the early 1990s, with several big hits like this one.

The cover is rather direct and not very subtle visualization of the idea of eternal youth, with the head of a baby shown big. The style of this cover is representative of the hardcore and trance covers of the 1990s. An aesthetic to which studios like I-D Büro and M-Design Wormerveer contributed a lot. While M-Design Wormerveer focused on illustration and drawings in many of its designs, I-D Büro is more at home with the technique of collage. But bright colors, collage effects, beveling, colorful and abstract backgrounds are always present in the works of both studios. In this example we see a lot of photo effects, which are essential for the saturated aesthetics of early 1990s hardcore covers.

The typography is crucial, too. OCR-A – a comon choice in electronic music – is used for the name of the group, with an outline between the panel that contains it and the title itself. The song title below is in Bank Gothic.

It’s not the first time that Interactive used OCR-A in their iconography: every time I-D Büro was involved in the design of their covers, we find this logo, see e.g. “Tell Me When” and “Touché”, both from 1995. On the back cover, the tracklist also is in OCR-A, and the credits in Bank Gothic.

[More info on Discogs]