Saturday, September 17, 2011

Higher Digital Sales= Cooler Hard Copies For Me

One of my favorite bands, The Devil Wears Prada, just release their new CD, Dead Throne, this past Tuesday. Needless to say I had to get it. A lot of the time I will buy my music through Amazon or iTunes just for the convenience of it, but when its a band I love or a CD I'm really looking forward to, I'll go buy the hard copy. Part of the reason for this is that it just feels more personal to me; I feel more connected to the music when I have something in my hands that the band made. But the other reason I still buy hard copies is because i LOVE album artwork. I just love how every part coincides with one another (I love it the most when the design on the CD fits with the rest of the design). Anyway, so I go get this new TDWP CD, and I was really impressed with the packaging. Like, really impressed. So much so that when I got done looking through the design of the packaging, I closed it up, forgetting that what I opened it for was for the actual CD! I would say mission accomplished for this design. That got me thinking about other CD packaging designs that have impressed me. Here's some examples of a few that I've really loved that have just come out this past year:

The Devil Wears Prada- Dead Throne


A Classic tri-fold. Nothing new yet....
This is where it gets unique: These panels all flip up!
You can see why I forgot to even grab the CD...but I love that!
Another unique way to incorporate the "CD sleeve"

Underoath- Disambiguation

This one is more about the CD sleeve, but the casing looks cool too.


This tri-fold case is a trip...
The awesome thing about this sleeve is that it uses regular paper AND vellum! The result is freaking awesome-looking. 
All of the artwork for this album was good.

I wish I could capture the level of complexity and thought that went into the design of each of these pages. You really do have to see it in person to get the full effect. You can tell the placement of every word and every design element was carefully thought out, even though it has a "random" look to it.

A Day To Remember- What Separates Me From You

This casing is cool in that with each fold, it tells a part of a story. Plus the fact that it opens up to a sort of cross shape is something I've never seen before in this type of media. Maybe its been done before? Idk, I don't care. It really works here.



This part is pretty clever. This is the top view of a street, and in the middle there, the band is down in the sewer. What makes it great is the fact that the CD deign looks like the lid to the sewer- how cool!

Do you know of any other cool examples of CD cases? Share them with me!

T-Rave pt.2

I've done a bit of work for my friend Travis Geary (aka T-Rave) in the past, mostly for personal projects that he's involved in or starts. The more I design something that involves T-Rave, though, the more I think its more fun than work. T-Rave has done a good job of kinda making himself a product, so I feel like its pretty easy to design things that have to do with him. I'm a big fan of "Aha's" in design, and just for clever little doodads in general, and I feel like I can naturally create things like that in T-Rave's case.
Anyways, recently T-Rave has been the culprit of many self-taken photo bombs, where he will apprehend an unattended phone and/or camera and snap a picture of himself. He will then post this photo on Facebook, twitter, etc. (with rather nice things to say about himself, I might add). This gave me a small spark of inspiration to design something quirky for T-Rave, to support even his wildest, least-serious endeavors:


Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Straits Wedding invitations!

Whew these invites took a while, but I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. My sister-in-law is somewhat of a designer herself, so she's proved to be my toughest client to date since she had as many ideas in mind as i did! In the end, a pretty good wedding invite came out of it, though. Take a look-- Can't wait for October 21!





Congrats, Ryan and Jordan!
BTW: Ryan and Jordan just got their engagement pictures posted online by Lark Photography.