I read a book towards the beginning of summer called ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell. In it he writes that the secret to being really, really good at something is practise. That the difference between successful musicians and less successful musicians is about 3000 hours of practise – and a total of 10,000 hours – that’s about 4-6 hours a day over 20-odd years.
So I realised over the summer that masses of practise through a continuous stream of voluntary projects has lifted my skills tremendously.
The first that I worked on was for a musician called Andy Kyte, who was going to play at an event called NewDay and wanted to have a CD recorded, designed and printed in time for it. I had about three weeks to design a 4-page booklet, back cover and tray sheet.
I had no specific direction, just a selection of possible album names and song titles. While I had experience of his music and the general ‘look’ of his stuff, it took me a while to try and find a comfortable design style to best reflect it.
After a few days working on this I felt no joy with it and eventually canned the idea.
The first idea was a cover made to look like a sort of grunge paper patchwork quilt, and I spent a while working with the idea, experimenting with colours and positioning of various squares in Photoshop. Andy Kyte stipulated that he wanted his logo, created by another graphic designer, to be included to promote some unity across his various musical ventures, and I couldn’t find a way to easily incorporate it into the design. I soon ditched the idea and started again, this time moving into Illustrator to try my hand at vector designs.
The second idea was a massive improvement in terms of trying to reflect Andy’s music visually. Working on his promotions team I knew that he wanted to try and get his music across to the 14-21 year-olds, and so I sketched a lot of the things I associated with teenagers and then started finding photographs of these objects and spent hours (literally) creating small vector versions of them.
I spent about 4 hours every night for a week working on this cover idea, but eventually realised along with Andy that the album, while perfectly aimed at his target audience, easily alienated anyone else who might be interested. So, second time around, I dropped the idea and started from scratch again.
By this time I had pretty much no time left – about 2 days to produce a final, viable design before the deadline. I was also working 9-5 every day, and had a friend visiting I wanted to spend time with in the little spare time I had left, so it was late nights and little sleep as I worked on a new design idea after bedtime. (Thankfully my friend was hugely forgiving and gracious and let me spend our last day together in front of my laptop!)
Again I was back to the sketchbook, but this time I had a look at one of my older ideas and, after discussing it with Andy, decided to pursue it. Instead of the blue I’d used in the previous draft, one that matched the blue in Andy’s logo, EP and his website, I went for a vivid green – to grab attention, to reflect ‘nature’ and also to create some diversity amongst his CDs. I created a vector chair by tracing over a photograph with the pen tool in Illustrator, and then made a tree and hillside based upon my own original drawing. I originally wanted a more photo-real look, and thought about stock images and the like, but the cost and complication of copyright and such found me experimenting with alternatives, so I returned back to the vector look.
Once I’d drawn them, I changed the lines to a more chalk-look, but the solid green background was just plain ugly. I dragged in various texture overlays, before settling on the paper texture (again). I also gave the chalk outline treatment to Andy’s logo and the album title text.
With little time left I assembled all the song lyrics, with two columns on each page. I de-capitalised the text too, putting capitals for particular words only.
The idea of a chair on a hillside was one that reflected this vague idea in my head of meeting with God in creation – and as the music was Christian worship music, this had tenuous connections with the genre but weren’t so overt as to be cliché. Andy asked me later what it actually meant, but beyond that simple explanation I still couldn’t put it into words. Andy, however, was satisfied with sending people my way if they wanted clarification!
Once finished, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. I wished I’d had more time to be able to work on the finer details and play around more with the song lyrics on the inside of the booklet, but unfortunately it just didn’t work out that way. I was, however, quite happy that the first draft never made it this far (it’s sooo ugly!) and hopefully, with the experience gained, the next album design projects will keep coming and each one will keep improving!
What I Learned
One of the things I was most nervous about was producing a project document with all the printer’s marks, dimensions, etc that were needed. Fortunately, the printers Andy chose had a huge set of resources on their websites with PDF templates and information for dimensions, bleeds, etc for each kind of software, so I was pretty well-prepared. And with my friend there to help me read through everything before sending it off, she was able to provide fresh eyes and point out some text errors I wouldn’t have seen myself! Always good to have another pair of eyes.
I will never regret a single hour spent on an unused design. Every single time I sat at the computer and worked and developed the idea, I found my familiarity with the various tools increasing, my eye for placement much better, a general improvement in the time it took me to do particular things, and I found myself far more able to transfer what was in my head onto paper and finally into the software itself. Which will all be hugely useful for me!
Final Outcome
As soon as I get my hands on the final printed CD I’ll get some pictures up!
