The Go-Go's - Vacation

Cover art by Mike Hagerty

Read more about the background of the creation of this cover here.

The PaperbackCinema CD Package Designs

The Paperback Cinema is a Alt-Folk collective from the Philadelphia area. One of it's memeber's is Tim McNally who I have done design work for in the past. With most of the music projects I work on, after meeting with the client and getting a good feel about what their music is all about, I am usually given creative freedom to design whatever I think will work best. Musicians can sometimes be wary of losing any kind of creative control when it comes to their music, so I find it is really important to have an honest conversation so that both parties can agree what the expectations are for the final project.

I am lucky that most of the music projects I have worked on, the musicans or record labels contact me and want to use me for my particular design and illustration styles. Because of this, there usually is very little in revisions.

This was of of those projects that basically went off without a hitch. I wanted to explore a more "restrained" type of illustration that felt like an underground graphic novel. One of the major changes for me in this piece was using various water color washes and using marker. I went through multiple versions trying to really get a solid overall consistant look and feel. There are some many variations, some with very little use of color and others that have big bold swatches of color. There was a little about each version that I liked so in the end I had to choose the version that seemed to incorporate the most of the best elements from all the versions.

When it was done, I was pleased with the end result and I really enjoyed the creative process that I went though to create this piece. One of the elements I love the most is the typography. I wanted a big bold slab font that had a 1950's pulp novel feel. I could'nt really find a typeface that I liked or that unique enough to visually marry with the illustration. I decided to create a typeface specifically for this project. I sketched out the font by hand and did multiple tracings until I got the way I wanted. I then scanned in the inked alphabet and cleaned it up a bit in Photoshop. From there I printed out the entire alphabet to a black and white laser printer and made a photocopy. Using the photocopy and turpentine, I transfered the letters onto a slab of Speedball lino block. I then carved out each letter(some letters had to carved multiple times to get them right). I then inked the blocks and printed out pages and pages of the letters. After printing the letters, I scanned in the best pages of the letters and picked out the best letters from the various prints. I vreated one Photoshop file that contained all the best letters and I then created a hi-res PS brush for each letter. Using the PS brushes I then created the type for the cd package.


It might seem like a long process just for the typography and I know it would have been quicker just to scan in the original sketches and used the computer to create them and distress them. By I never really care to take the "quick and easy" way. First of all I love what I do so why would I want to shorten the time I get to do it? Secondly, if you really want to get a "hand drawn" feeling and get small imperfections to the look and feel then there is no better way than to do it by hand.


A design will always have a much stronger feel to it if some part of it was created by hand because the artist has a connection to the work through a tacile response as the ink or paint is applied.


Finished package design (click to enlarge):





CD single cover that uses more of fontface:




Finished package design (click to enlarge):





Here are some photos of the font creation process:

Original sketch:


Transfering the letters onto the block:


Cutting out the letters:


Close view of progress:


One of the many prints that were scanned in:


Sorry for the really long post. Hope you enjoyed it though.

>K. Von B.

James Apollo-Good Grief

Cover design by Adam Strom

Hope for music design in 2008

With all the talk about CD and DVD sales plummeting and digital downloads taking the place of something you can hold in your hands and examine, I decided I better hop on the A-train quickly or be relegated to the CD/DVD graphic design scrap heap.

Let me first explain that I am actually old enough to have designed my first album cover in 1974. From there, the industry took a pretty abrupt leap to the smaller format of compact discs while still retaining the need for a graphic designer to design the physical packaging.

With digital downloading on the rise, my first thoughts were, “Great, another product line of graphic design I will have to drop.” Not so fast. Seems, that maybe this whole switcheroo won’t be as bad as I first thought.

Antony Bruno has written an article for Billboard magazine titled, “Digital album packaging should improve in 2008.” It’s well worth the time to read for anyone even remotely interested in the future of graphic design and music. Read Bruno's article here.

Digg this article

Cover Story: Album Cover Art

Remember when music albums had huge spaces to design with? I do. Boy I miss those things.

I remember as a teen, sitting and listening to music while visually devouring the album cover.

Then came CDs. Micro versions of what I had growing up. But still, at least there was something to hold in my hands, read and appreciate.

What's next? I'm sure it will be in some kind of online, digital form. It just can't be anywhere near the same kind of all encompassing experience when it finally appears. Maybe it will be better? Nah.

Cover Story: Album Cover Art looks like a good book for both those of us who grew up with album cover design and for those who want to know what all the whining's about.

"A coffee-table-ready collection of album covers, from the lewd to the ludicrous. It's perfect." -The Village Voice

Cover Story: Album Cover Art vividly explores an element of music culture that has withered with the advent of MP3s and digital downloading. Records possess a visual as well as an aural capacity for storytelling. The record cover--eye candy for the music lover--speaks a language rooted in the environment and era of the music itself. And, more intimately, a record can create a profound sense of analogy with its owner, and it's this relationship that we share.

Preface by Brian DiGenti and introduction by Dave Tompkins. The Wax Poetics team handpicked twenty albums apiece, 240 albums in all, twelve chapters: editor-in-chief Andre Torres; editor Brian DiGenti; contributing editors Matt Rogers, Andrew "DJ Monk One" Mason, Dante Carfagna, and J. P. Jones; contributing photo editor Brian "B+" Cross; contributing writers Jeff "Chairman" Mao, Oliver Wang, Robbie Busch, and Dave Tompkins; and label head Amir Abdullah.

Available from Wax Poetics Books.

Aeroplane Over The Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel

Great cover art from a team of great artists/designers.

For the background history of this cover art, I am liberally quoting from the Lost In The Grooves blog:

There are no great records without great sleeves, and Aeroplane’s is a stunner. The front cover shows a group of old fashioned bathers—though with the odd cropping it’s unclear if they are waving from the shoreline or drowning in the deeps. The central figure, a curvaceous lass in a gold-starred red costume, gazes out from a perfectly neutral visage, in place of her face an oversized, well-used drum head. That same drum is found on the back cover, strung round the tallest of the stilt-striding musicians who march across a pastoral stage-set unsuited to their blare. Externally, the name Neutral Milk Hotel appears only on the spine, and on a sticker that Merge applied to the shrink-wrap.

The record cover was a collaboration between Jeff Mangum and Chris Bilheimer, R.E.M.’s staff designer. But the first bit of art came from the pen of Brian Dewan, a visual artist, inventor, filmmaker, carpenter and musician from New York. The iconic line drawing of the enormous Victrola soaring above a smoky city is his. Brian’s first Elephant 6 collaboration came when Julian Koster asked him to provide drawings for posters to be inserted inside early singles by The Music Tapes. These singles had three-dimensional pop-up sleeves that Julian and his friends painstakingly cut out with x-acto knives, a fact Brian discovered when Julian asked if he could recommend a good die-cutter. Julian supplied Brian with words and drawings, and Brian adapted this material for the poster, which featured land- and waterscapes decorated with mysterious slogans like "March of the Father Fists" and "Every time you light a cigarette with a candle a sailor will not return from sea."

Not long after the Music Tapes commission, Brian got a call from Jeff Mangum, who identified himself as Julian’s housemate. Would Brian be interested in doing some artwork for his new record? Intrigued by the tape he received, Brian agreed to draw two things for Jeff: a flying Victrola and a magic radio. That Victrola would become a shorthand symbol for Neutral Milk Hotel and In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, but first it was just one in a stack of potential graphic elements that Jeff brought to Chris Bilheimer when it came time to design the jacket.

Chris Bilheimer was a fine arts student at the University of Georgia when he stumbled onto his dream job with R.E.M. in 1993. Grateful for the opportunity to make a living making art (and to make art on the best equipment “Losing My Religion” could buy), he was a notoriously easy touch for indie artists needing record covers or poster design. Chris had told Jeff to call if he ever needed help; for Aeroplane, Jeff took him up on the offer.

Bryan Poole recalls that Jeff “was always into that old timey, magic, semi-circus, turn-of-the-century, penny arcade kind of imagery,” examples of which he’d find in thrift shops on his travels. Among the pieces that Jeff brought Chris was a vintage European postcard of bathers at a resort, and this was the image that Chris—working closely with Jeff—cropped and subtly altered to create Aeroplane’s front cover. The other source material included a book of historic circus posters, a clip art book of cloud formations, Will Hart’s Elephant 6 logo and Brian Dewan’s aerial cityscape.

Although Chris Bilheimer mainly works on computers, his aesthetic is more analog than digital. The disparate images selected for the album design ranged from Brian Dewan’s crisp new drawing to the slightly grubby old postcard. How could all these pieces be given a visually cohesive look? Chris solved the problem by scanning the back of the postcard, and using the foxed, spotted, off-white paper as the background against which all other images were screened. In this way, everything appeared to be about the same age and printed on similar paper, with the overall effect one of slow decay. Chris even left a splash of dirt on the postcard—just above the girl’s waving hand—a touch that’s easily overlooked on the CD cover, but obvious on the larger LP jacket. The CD contained a piece of art absent from the album, two reproductions of tiny human figures beneath dramatic clouds. These images appear on the back side of the single sheet of paper on which the CD cover was printed, with the mysterious numerals “205/6” a carry-over from the back of the vintage postcard.

Instead of a standard lyric sheet, Chris arranged the song titles, lyrics (which Jeff provided) and other information like a broadsheet. Every song had a title except the one that starts “The only girl I’ve ever loved/ Was born with roses in her eyes.” He asked Jeff what to call the track. Jeff said he was thinking about calling it “Holland,” or maybe “1945.” Chris suggested he combine the two titles, which is how he named what would become his favorite song on the album.

Chris: “I wanted to have a little bit of a ‘circus coming to town’ feel without an obviously circusy-looking image. And so I laid out this whole thing and printed it out and crinkled it up and then scanned it back in and laid it on top of old paper. I work really hard to make things look like they weren’t made on a computer. Even though I’m not using traditional graphic methods—it’s the same reason bands like recording with tube amps and recording to tape instead of to hard drive—it has that tactile warmth to it. That’s what I try to do with graphic design. Especially by designing something, printing it out, fucking it up and then scanning it back in.” Most of the fonts used came from old typography books and were set by hand, although the headline is set in an especially handsome computer font derived from Vineta, an inline shadowed Clarendon designed in 1973 by Ernst Volker.

Chris had agreed to help Jeff with the design prior to hearing the record. Once he did, he was “absolutely blown away by it. I thought ‘holy crap, this is the best record in ten years!’” While this made him excited about the project, it also stirred up unexpected emotional responses. For example, during the design process, he and Jeff initially worked up a different back cover based around the lower portion of the vintage postcard, showing the woman bather’s feet trailing off into the water. Chris was very attached to the image, but Jeff decided he didn’t want to use it. Chris: “I remember almost wanting to start crying. And I was driving home, thinking, ‘I really need to back off and not be so emotionally involved. It’s not my record!’ I learned a really good lesson about designing. And ultimately I think he made a good decision.”

Although In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is not the most famous record Chris Bilheimer worked on, nor the best-selling, it remains the design he’s most proud of, and it occupies a prominent place in his portfolio, where music industry people regularly exclaim over it. Once he was bemused to find someone selling “really crappy, kinda high schooly pencil sketch of the cover” on eBay, with a description claiming it was the original layout; he emailed eBay and got the auction pulled.

Even after the art was completed and the album released, Chris maintained a relationship with Neutral Milk Hotel, often seeing them play at house parties and formal gigs around Athens. Chris recalls, “There’s three times in a row where I saw them live and I started crying. It was something you really couldn’t put your finger on. The music was really beautiful, and the lyrics might have been obtuse and not something you could directly relate to, but there was something in Jeff’s voice, just the sound of his voice, that encapsulated so many different feelings at the same time. It was just incredibly moving. I think the goal of most art is to transcend your medium or your surroundings— and that just happened at every show, for me, anyway.”

20th Anniversary Edition: The Joshua Tree

Prepare to feel older than dirt.

It's been 20 years since Steve Averill designed the cover of U2's The Joshua Tree. Visit Steve's site here.