Layout

so in addition to getting to do a lot of illustration, it's also a lot of fun to work with other people's artwork and ideas. Paper+Plastick is always releasing great records by great bands, and sometimes they already have great art that just needs some layout work. it's excellent exercise for me to stretch my design muscles and reconfigure pieces of a puzzle into a cool looking record that is unique to each band, and especially because design is a rather weak area of mine that i would really like to have a better understanding of

here's the fantastic full length from Boston's Have Nots, who are super awesome to work with. i'm actually very fond of this, even though another great designer pretty much did all of this already for their CD, i got to bring a tiny percent of myself to the table :

this is an EP for Let Me Run, featuring stellar artwork by Dave Quiggle!

and in the following, The Swellers had their new album's layout (on Fueled By Ramen) all ready to go, but for the vinyl release, P+P wanted to give them that extra bit of awesome, and i was kindly asked to do some hand written type! always a labor of love, and always, in my opinion, worth the extra work and attention

it starts of course with the band sending me the lyrics in a live text document:
i take their words as they've written them, and lay it out in the LP's insert template to make sure it all fits nicely. once i know where the pieces are approximately going, i start writing it out. it ends up like this (feel free to click for a larger view if you like):

phew! the goal was for the writing to look like someone carved it into the wood with a knife. i kept a mean hand and a tough wrist and a day later i inversed the colors and voila!