As a book designer I rarely get to do CD covers but last week I got to do one: Temple Bahan Band.
For me the process was almost the same as for books, just with some different details: I decided to play the CD’s music while working. I have to say that it was different, while listening to the music I tried to think of images and finally more than just images, what I found through the music were layers: different layers with the various voices & instruments that I translated into colors, images, swirls, shapes, and different levels of transparency & this is how I came to design the first mock-ups.
The publisher’s feedback was that they wanted to add some city/party/celebration/ritual themes to the images so from that I worked on it graphically: the old wall texture in the background, the Hindu god, the crowd, some flowers related to Hindu rituals…and here’s the new covers, that yes, the publisher liked.
Very nice, tight description of process. I wonder, does the work having to do with music–and your having the audio stimulation that you just play and there it is–lend itself to such an easy, concise way of capturing how you did the work?
hello.. am a graphics student and i really like how you did the background of the designs and i was wondering how you did that using photoshop :)
Hi Sutej,
I don’t use much Photoshop, only to retouch individual images or cut backgrounds, I work mostly in Illustrator & InDesign. This work was done in Illustrator as a combination of layers with different transparency modes and opacity levels:
I think that the bottom image was a photograph of a wall to generate the texture, then a layer of gold gradient, then a cut of a crowd that you can barely see on the bottom (repeated bigger and smaller to give the idea of distance), and so on with all the elements like flowers, vectors, etc.
Good luck!