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ANATOMY OF A CD
There's way more to any project than the cover. Natch. This page on the anatomy of a CD project is here to illuminate the design strategy and process for a particular project.

RAW MATERIAL
We start with nothing but a title. I toy with the idea of using an actual clawhammer and quickly reject this notion. Then the four artists who appear on this CD each supplied a photo. All were various stages of marginal from a technical perspective. Careful cropping, photo editing and conversion to "old-fashioned" sepia tones helped them look like part of a series.

The old-timey look seems appropriate and a graphic vocabulary starts to develop.

The cover image resulted from a jawboning session I had with executive producer and label owner James Jensen. That's his guitar and fingers in motion reflecting the "clawhammer" style of playing.

 

 

ABOVE — The front and the back of it; what a person browsing in a record store would see. The graphic vocabulary for the entire project is established on these two pieces of paper. Graphic vocabulary? That's the old-timey gold dimensional project "logotype," the background color and dimensional gold image frame, the typestyle and color for subheadings and the typestyle used for body text. BELOW — The booklet's gatefold panels express the graphic vocabulary again. BELOW BELOW — The black/white inside also expresses the graphic vocabulary, albeit in less dramatic form. This project was unusual in that it had an extensive literary exposition: "A Short Complete History of Clawhammer Guitar" by Steve Baughman. Behind Steve's story is a ghostly, much enlarged image of the cover photo.