PASH — Am I a Salted Fish?
PASH · 2024–2025
PASH is a Taiwanese independent musician who writes, produces, and performs her own work. Between 2024 and 2025, B.RADY Design partnered with PASH across the full release cycle of her debut album Am I a Salted Fish? — from the first single through to the complete album. The collaboration covered art direction and cover design for three singles, the album cover, and the direction and production of an animated music video. Each deliverable was developed in close dialogue with PASH, whose strong creative involvement shaped the direction of every release.
Each of PASH's songs carries its own emotional world. Haters Say is sharp and satirical; Sometimes is quiet and introspective; The 7-Word Mantra of Ma Zi Gou is playful and absurd. Designing for a release series like this means building visual identities that are distinct enough to stand on their own — but coherent enough to eventually belong together.
The challenge was not simply to design six covers. It was to build a visual logic that could hold radically different moods in the same frame — and to make that logic visible at the moment the album dropped. The album cover needed to feel like a natural conclusion, not an assembly of unrelated pieces.
This required thinking about the end from the beginning: which visual elements from each single could carry forward, and how they might coexist in a single image without losing their individual character.
The process followed the release sequence — but the visual system was developed with the album's end state in mind from the start. Before the first single launched, a central question was already being considered: what kind of image could hold all of these songs together, and what would each single need to contribute to it.
The answer took the form of a collage. PASH stands at the center, her head open to the world — and out of it spill the characters, objects, and moods that each song carries. The satirical lips and citrus energy of Haters Say. The sky and airplane of Sometimes. The cartoon dog of The 7-Word Mantra of Ma Zi Gou. The strawberry — a recurring image from the Am I a Salted Fish? music video, used as a symbol of something overripe, something that doesn't quite fit. Each element had already lived its own life as a single before finding its place in the final frame.
This meant that every cover design decision carried a dual purpose: to work as a standalone release, and to contribute a visual ingredient to the album. The collage format was chosen precisely because it could absorb this multiplicity — not by flattening it into uniformity, but by celebrating the coexistence of distinct things inside one mind.
The animated music video for The 7-Word Mantra of Ma Zi Gou extended this logic into motion. Produced entirely in-house, the video translated the song's playful, looping absurdity into an animated world that matched the character already established in the single cover.
Am I a Salted Fish? was released on June 25, 2025. The album cover brought together visual elements from across the release cycle — characters, objects, and moods that had each appeared in their own single — and placed them inside one frame, emerging from PASH's open mind.
What made this project rewarding was the duration of the collaboration. Designing across a full release cycle meant that each decision could build on the last. The visual language grew with the music, and by the time the album arrived, the cover felt less like a designed artifact and more like an inevitable conclusion.
Working closely with an artist who is deeply involved in her own creative process also shaped how the work developed. PASH's input at every stage pushed the visual direction toward something more personal and specific — which is ultimately what made each cover distinct enough to stand alone, and coherent enough to belong together.
Singles & Album Cover
Cover Design — Brady Chen (Sometimes), Brady Chen & Xiluo Sun (Haters Say, Album Cover)
The 7-Word Mantra of Ma Zi Gou — Animated MV
Director — Brady Chen
Illustration — Brady Chen, Xiluo Sun
Animation — Andrew Zhuang
Graphic & Logotype Design — Brady Chen
Am I a Salted Fish? — Music Video
Director / Photography / Editor — Adrian Feng
Story — Adrian Feng, PASH
Post-production Assistant — Li Wan Tieh, PASH
Graphic & Logotype Design — Brady Chen