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He could pass for any 43-year-old who lives in L.A.īut, as he tells it, he’s always had an appetite for art, fashion, and design. Dressed in a plain white T-shirt, navy blue trousers, and a pair of grey New Balance 992 sneakers, he has wispy brown hair combed over to the right side of his head and a grey beard. Perron is much more inconspicuous than the well-known names he works with. But after all the success, where does he want to go from here? You hear people all the time now say they’re creative directors, but he is the truest sense of that word.”įor the last two decades or so, Perron has masterminded some of the biggest projects, for some of the biggest artists and brands in the world. “Willo’s one of the guys that made that term synonymous with these kids. George has known Perron for almost 15 years and has worked with him on various projects, including Stüssy’s brick and mortar locations. “Willo is the original,” adds Matt George, the man behind streetwear emporiums Nomad and Stüssy in Toronto and Vancouver. “I don’t think anyone really cared about titles, but I was like, ‘If I’m going to do this everyday, with this guy, it can’t just be ‘Kanye’s entourage has a couple creative guys in there.’ It felt like a lack of respect for the craft. “Back in the day, I think that was more management in the artists’ ears,” he says. But when Perron first worked with West, the profession didn’t exist. West, over the years, has built an entire team of collaborators under Donda, his well-regarded creative company. Nearly all of the top acts in music have at least one consigliere in their team. The titles creative director and art director have become commonplace today. Most recently, he was responsible for the blockbuster Nike x NBA global launch, where the league’s new jerseys were revealed behind three moving big screen monoliths. He also designed the set and stage visuals for Drake’s 2013 Would You Like A Tour? and built several of Stüssy’s retail locations. “I guess after years of successful Kanye and Rihanna stuff, you eventually get that call ,” he says. Rihanna has enlisted him to creative direct many of her performances, including her Diamonds Tour, ANTI Tour, and her 2016 MTV Video Vanguard Award production.
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In 2008, he worked on Kanye West’s critically acclaimed Glow in The Dark Tour. But he’s been behind the scenes of other memorable album covers, live shows, retail spaces, and videos for years. Perron first worked with Jay-Z on the rapper’s 2012 American Express UNSTAGED performance at South by Southwest. During the show, Jay-Z performed on an octagonal stage, placed in the middle of the stadium, with eight vertically-suspended screens hovering above him that showed various camera angles from the stage and footage of peers and family, some of which he erased himself from. While he won’t say much about it, he also designed the set and stage visuals for the official 4:44 Tour, which kicked off late last month. “When we landed on 4:44, I was like, ‘It’s just this color and these digits.’ We wanted to do a really didactic campaign.” “We went through a few other iterations of what the record was going to be called,” Perron says in his first extensive interview. He designed the album artwork and played a seminal role in the brilliant rollout that included the mysterious “4:44” ads and the black and white teaser starring Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, which premiered during the 2017 NBA Finals.
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Perron, a multi-disciplinary designer and director, collaborated with Jay-Z to concept the packaging and creative direction for 4:44.
#Jay z 444 album artwork manual
“It’s really a manual for the 4:44 brand,” he says, sitting in his West Hollywood studio on an October afternoon. Over several peach-colored pages, in simple black Larish Neue font, there are release dates for 4:44 in different countries, photos of the 4:44 ads plastered on billboards, buses, taxis, and subway stations that teased the rapper’s thirteenth studio album, and more. Hunched over his laptop, Willo Perron is scrolling through a digital mock-up of an unreleased project for Jay-Z’s 4:44 album.