CD Design #5

A short break from blogging over the Easter break, but plenty of work done on the CD design. I spent a good deal of time exploring variations on the three themes Jon favoured from the original six. This development focussed on the use of the monoprint image, colour, and type. The image below shows many of the design stages and variations and can be viewed a bit larger if you click on it.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to show Jon all of these, but I worked them up a little more for the sake of the blog (oh, the lengths I go to!) and needed to edit these down to three or four, which is much harder than it sounds. In the end, I decided to present three designs, with two further variations on one of them:

Top left, selected for the impact of the printed colour field background, whose yellow was originally sampled from a Herbie Hancock record sleeve, against the much smaller figure, giving the impression of solitude or introspection. The typeface (Pagan Poetry) was used to add a soft geometric edge to contrast the printed imagery. It has a ‘book cover’ quality that I thought would appeal to Jon.
Top right was a departure from the original design, with added texture layers and the second print portrait worked into the background. The colours came about partly through experimentation with transparent blues and yellows, and the serendipity of a random photograph that I rediscovered (hidden in a folder named ‘odd stuff’. Every designer should have these – just random stuff you like or think might be useful – the graphic designers version of the kitchen drawer – you know the one; full of odds and ends, paper bags and assorted bits of things that have been broken off things and never reunited with their original parts…)  Anyway, this photo is a partially obscured old photo with a very warm cast that eventually gave the design its grey-green, mouldy, distressed colouring. (I’ll go through the Photoshop layers next time) The text is a  heavily expanded display face called Millhouse, based on the Honda typeface, and is geometrically aligned vertically and horizontally to add a structural dynamic to the overall composition. The bottom row shows three versions of the third design. From left, the simplest, two colour version, using one monoprint image heavily cropped to head and shoulders and incorporating the title reversed out from the textured background with Jons’ name asymmetrically aligned in the bottom margin. The type is a slightly out of kilter sans serif face called Shag Lounge. The middle version picks out the type in white and has the second image blended into the background. The original dark line was used over the full red background. The last version is a combination of both. I was undecided as to which of the three to present, and in the end decided to show all three as they each had merits I felt that Jon would identify.

Having explored the sleevenotes and lyrics to gauge how the space would likely be utilised and found that the amount of lyrics (13 songs in all) will dominate any design, especially if composed in standard lyric format. I investigated a number of typefaces/sizes in this layout and found I could get down to 6pt in some places whilst retaining very good legibility. This was done black on white and did not account for the possibilities of background colours/textures etc. As the design direction hadn’t yet been decided upon, this was something I’d have to deal with later.

Even at these small sizes, the standard verse/chorus/verse layout would still use up most of the seven available pages, so I decided to pitch another layout style in, than bunched up the lyrics in a continuous block, negating the need for lots of additional surrounding space. This will release further space, but I’m not sure about how Jon will respond to this, having his lyrics reduced and processed to fit a design, but I’ll pitch it and see. I formatted a couple of pages into continuous text and experimented with slashes, points and various other methods of separation:

Lyrics reproduced with kind permission.

Monday 20 April Pitched the three designs to Jon, who very quickly ruled out the predominately yellow ‘booky’ design. I misjudged that one. The three variations were discussed at length and were neither discounted nor jumped upon, but the green/grey design was given a unanimous approval and any further discussion was rendered futile. I then discussed the typographic treatments for the sleevenotes, and Jon, again, to my surprise, opted for the continuous block lyrics, using vertical slashes to separate each line. The text typeface for the design will be Officina Serif. Job Done. Now to get on with putting this together and making the design work beyond the cover…

As the job is completed I will be evaluating the process from a designers perspective and reflecting upon the decisions made throughout the project. I am hoping that Jon will give me some feedback from his perspective too.

Picture This!

Ok, so I haven’t done anything since the Obama poster (which didn’t get the kind of response I was after, but oh well!) so I thought I’d offer up a new image request – I’d like to make this a competition to encourage more participation, but until then it’s simply a request. What I’m looking for are…

 ARMS LENGTH SELF-PORTRAITS

Obviously, this must be a photograph of yourself taken by you at arms length. You can use any image capture device known to mankind, and if you’re feely saucy, you can manipulate them. But you might want to leave them raw. Capture yourself at any time of day doing anything; moving, sneezing, yawning, crying, eating – just make them interesting. Make sure that they are no larger than 276×276 pixels and 72dpi and named in this format skinnerchrisportrait.jpg (obviously using your own name!) or .png or .gif  and email them to me for inclusion. Please note that if you are sending me images, then you are giving me your consent to publish them on the web. Don’t send them if you don’t want them uploading. These images will only be used for this purpose and my own personal jocularity!

PS. The image above was taken a year ago with a crappy cameraphone and edited in PhotoShop. It’s a bit dull I know, but I will be taking some more and hopefully being more inventive than this…

PPS. Thanks to my brother Lee (who is a real master at the arms length portrait) for inspiring this theme.

ADDITIONAL – I will be giving away a unique handmade sketchbook for my favourite entry
T’s & C’s: My decision is final.

CD Design #4

Saturday 11 April Continued to work on colour schemes, sampling Blue Note sleeves (reds/blues/yellows as Jon preferred) and exploring transparency and overlay effects, looking for the best natural combination of colour, working with each other and allowing good contrast on black and white. This was set up as a swatch in Illustrator – I will add more colours at a later date – so I can select them as I would do with any of the swatches.

 

 I also set Illustrator files for the base artwork of a two-piece/eight page booklet and back insert and imported all the lyrics and sleeve notes, to get an idea of the space that the basic graphic content is needed and gauge the possibilities for composition with other possible images and photographs:

As you can see, there are a lot of lyrics to include, some of which are quite long. This will take some getting into place, as well as some sensitive typographic treatment.

I processed the images taken last week at Jon’s request, of some of the instruments he played on the recording, as well as his lyric notebooks too. There are a few good images here that would work well within the design:

I’m going to get back on to the actual design tonight and tomorrow, and hopefully have something to show Jon after the Bank Holiday.

100% for Effort!

I noticed this sign (or signs) on a shop in King’s Lynn a while ago, and this week as I walked to work, I passed it again, but it being early, the shop was shut and not many folk were around. Luckily, I had my camera with me to record this – not the fact that that the entire door had been converted into a warning over a one inch step painted yellow, but mainly for the bottom sign. It made me smile.

Clearly, someone has spent a considerable amount of time on this…

CD Design #3

Monday 6 April Ok, so here are the notes I made after the last meeting when I discussed the colour monoprint image with Jon:

And these are the designs developed further and in presentation mode. Please note that these are not finished designs, but initial ideas to begin a more detailed dialog. Click on each of the images below for a larger view…

 

So I show Jon each of these today and talk through the thinking behind each one, and how I had responded to his original comments. Each of the designs reflects elements of the conversation we had, about earthtones and acid colours, high contrast and elements of classic record sleeve design. I’ll let you imagine where these apply – if anyone would like to add their critique at this point (deep breath) please feel free – I am interested in what others think of the designs, my approach in general (which I will reflect upon when the project ends) or the tone of this thread on the blog…

So Jon considers each one, and a discussion ensues, involving Ross, another musician, in which each of the designs was dissected, and I chipped in my comments wherever I felt necessary, but leaving them to banter between themselves, which gave me some interesting responses about practicalities of selling online (tiny thumbnails, no clarity, written info always given) and how musicians think about music packaging generally – Jon and Ross have both released a number of records over the years and are no strangers to this process.

Jon then gave me his ‘first official responses’ which I scrawled on a print later. You can read some of the notes on the larger image, just click…(yes, you know what to do now!)

Please note, not only has the record title changed, but I have not written it correctly! The upshot was that the two designs ticked were favoured most, but needed to be seen in other colours (not green-aargh!!) and the one with the (?) could be explored further without the perspective type. The three others were rejected on ‘looking too much like part of a box set’ (middle, top), ‘don’t like the type’ (middle, bottom), and ‘just not right for the music’ (right, bottom), which I expected, but I always like to put in a wild card as it often provokes other responses, and makes the client look again at the earlier designs. I’ve left the prints with Jon to consider some more and will be meeting him tomorrow to photograph some instruments for possible inclusion. No doubt there will be more to post…

The Designers 01

Inspired by Chris Harding’s WeThe Robots and of course, the wonderful world of graphic design, here is the first installment of my new cartoon strip featuring two stereotype graphic designers and one old old joke. I will be posting one a month so stay tuned…

CD Design #2 (updated)

Monday 30 March  At the end of my teaching sessions today I escaped up to the Printroom and got set up to monoprint a couple of sample for Jon. (I was rushing so didn’t photograph the process, but I will do something more in-depth if we continue with this approach) I made six images based on three of the photos from the shoot. Four were reasonably good. As I said, these are roughs, but give a good indication of the kind of qualities the process creates, levels of detail etc. The prints were made in black – any imagery made this way will be further modified on screen, especially colour.

 

Wednesday 1 April I met with John and showed the prints, along with one or two other alternative approaches (as I said, I wasn’t sure that Jon was sold on this idea so I needed to be prepared). As it was, he gave a very positive response and agreeing that (1) and (3) were good possibilities, and that it was worth pursuing this approach.

The other approaches were the ‘old distressed photo(a)’, and the ‘fake monoprint (b)’ that holds a little more detail. These were summarily dismissed.

So examining each of prints closer, I decided to use part of print 4 to improve print 3 on the head of the guitar. Each was scanned at 300dpi at 100%. A soft selection of the area was made and transferred to print 3, where I spent a little time blending the two for a seamless join:

 

I’ll be adding new layers, textures and colours over the next few days, and will be meeting Jon again to discuss colours, and the eventual format of the design. I now have the lyrics and sleevenotes from Jon and will do some basic layouts to calculate how much space is needed – I always like to know my minimum areas early in order to plan properly. These will be added shortly.

ADDITIONAL

This is a multi-layered image using scanned monoprint textures (which are available for copyright-free use from my own Flickr photostream) A denser monoprint texture background was added to which small areas were erased, creating a little depth through minimal highlights. A second texture layer was added and edited to create the shadow area at the right. To acheive the tranparency of the colours, the blending mode on each of the layers was set to multiply. The colours at this point are still arbitrary and used to demonstrate effects only.

Friday 3 April Jon was quite pleased with this image and we discussed how it might be used in the design. We discussed colours (earthtones to acid colours!) and typographic treatments, where I suggested some classic Blue Note Jazz covers might offer some good stylistic cues, which didn’t go down too well! I sketched out one or two ideas that I had already had and made some general notes about some of the things Jon had said. I’ll scan this in and add it to the next instalment…