Musician and Designer rolled into one Human: Part One.

I am a musician, sorry I am a man who plays music but I am also a designer. Knowing music like I do I understand the importance of the marriage of the two. Now imagine you have to design for your own music.

That's the crisis I found myself in at the end of last year as I was putting together a collection of songs that I had recorded. I played around for ages in sketchbooks trying to work it out and I settled on a style not dissimilar to the work of the great Barney Bubbles. I'd fallen in love with a font called 'Compacta' and that's how I was going to do it.

Using the bright colours and play that Barney Bubbles had in his work (for Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and Hawkwind), I was going to produce a small illustration for each of the songs. These would be arranged on the back cover in track order. Presented below are what I was thinking.

For the front cover; I put the emphasis on play. I wanted to call the album 'Waking Up', as in waking up to the world; politically, emotionally and just in general waking up because we all do it on a daily basis. If you are reading this, you have woken up at some point today. Anyway...in a little brain storm session I had with myself; sleep > snoring > zzzzzzzzz. This was to be the cover;

 However after problems with arranging the tracks on the back cover, having doubts with the front cover and the option to re-record some of the tracks with a band (of my Dad and Bro); I fell out of favour with these designs.