Designing Stories With Music

Everything has a story. The only difference between a movie and a piece of clothing or a cover of an album is that one has its story laid out for you to see, while the others are completely up for interpretation. Both are fantastic. But in this particular case, I put my design skills to use to help out some friends. A few years ago, 2 of my friends created a band and began making music. I don't play an instrument, but I was happy to help in any way I could. It wasn't until around July I was approached to make a physical copy for them. In the worldwide scene of independent music, cassettes are something of a novelty. For bands who are too small to warrant the money it takes to create a vinyl pressing, and for a world where everyone's pretty much sick of CDs, it seems that there's only one viable option left for collectors of physical music: 8̶ ̶T̶r̶a̶c̶k̶  Cassettes. Luckily, after a few days of research and a trip to the Santa Maria Electronic Parts Supermart (Rest in peace... and screw you Best Buy) I had everything I needed. They already had the basic square shaped album art done by a friend, but the rest of the J-Card was up to me. I went into photoshop and got to work on something that I thought fit the overall aesthetic and theme of the album, and worked from there. There was only a small run of 10 tapes, but they sold out and even after I had a lot of people asking for more.

Fast forward to early February, and there's a new EP on the way. This time, with more Photoshop experience under my belt, I was tasked with creating the entire album art and J-Card. It was a bit more work coming up with an idea and theme but the entire band was there to throw out ideas this time, so the aesthetic was captured. You are welcome to make your own conclusions of it. As I type this I'm sitting next to 14 blank cassette tapes, ready to be made. Despite design being only one of the many things I'm interested in pursuing, I really enjoy doing stuff like this and it's a contender up there for career choice for sure. 

also, if you want to check their album out, listen here!