I was recently approached by a local band who wanted me to come up with a sleeve design for their first EP. Their music is a mixture of blues and country and the band wanted this reflected in a “western look” for the artwork.
I started off thinking along the lines of a faded, old-west style “wanted” poster but this quickly evolved into a much darker, monotone design inspired by the title cards of silent movies.
Seeing as most of my design work to date has been web-based it made a nice change to have a crack at designing for print, although working at such a high resolution took some getting used to. For instance, I found putting together the background took a lot longer than creating a website background as it meant stiching together lots of different paper textures and masking the joins.
Still, as a first foray into print design I’m quite pleased with the results. Let me know what you think.
Here’s the front cover…

And here’s the back:

WordPress
5 Comments
Nice sleeve. Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in Devil’s Road? You can’t just g around ignoring punctuation now you’re an arty designer!
I haven’t lost my “excellent spelling and grammar skills” now that I’ve gone IT but in this case I’m just required to make things look pretty – punctuation is the band’s department.
Thanks for writing this.
This design is so dark, it gives it so much more character than simply making it old fashioned. Good work.
great peice, im trying to get into designing record sleeves now and your style is very interesting, the boarders at the corners are my personal favourite.
keep up the good work