Design Reviews » music

Illustrator designed CD covers

DRMark — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 14:40:35 +0000

A couple of years ago I designed some CD covers to match up with some music I recorded and had on old tapes in boxes in the garage! I recorded a lot with a couple of friends in about 1990 or so. Recently with the increased power offered by the average computer and the availability of cheap or even free software to record and multitrack I got interested in making music again. Using just my old Strat, computer and a wah wah pedal I have made quite a few new recordings. The original lineup of friends now live quite a long way away and we haven’t met for years but I have replaced them with synthesised and computer generated versions! And they don’t argue with me!

Here are the four album/CD covers I designed, one includes a sound clip to go with it, recorded about 3 years ago.

We control the horizontal, click to play clip!

Ebbs; We control the horizontal (Clip)

The following don’t have sound clips attached at the moment. Quagmire was mixed down at half speed for the first few seconds by accident, but I liked it so kept that in

Quagmire (unsightly return)

A BBC theme inspired piece of music follows, made on a Yamaha keyboard in 1992

Sherlock foams

Finally back to some distorted “space rock”;

Space Sponge

inspired by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which I had just got for Christmas a year or two before in the late 1980s!

If I get some comments about this I might put up more samples other than just for “We control the horizontal”, the other three CD covers are associated with tracks from around 1990. All the CD covers are designed and illustrated in Adobe Illustrator. I used photoshop a little on the Space Sponge CD above for inserting the sponge into the helmet and making the moon into a green sponge!

You might notice the first of the 4 CD covers has a different logo, this new logo is for new stuff since 2006, just things recorded by myself. Also I’ve found out there’s some band in the US of A called “The Ebbs” so the name’s gone already. I wonder if the name was gone in 1990 when we made the first recordings…

Classical Event Music – website design

DRMark — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:14:42 +0000

This week I have just completed a website for my daughter, it’s called “Classical Event Music.co.uk“. She and a group of friends aim to provide music and musical entertainment to social events and gatherings throughout the northwest of England/Wales. Or if the price is right, anywhere! The reason it took so long is gathering the media/photos… The site design was finished in October last year as you can see from the page first post. Oh, another thing I just did to complete the site is design the great little favicon in Illustrator, looks pretty cool to me, it’s just a simple treble bass clef and a champagne glass composite image. Pretty funky for a 16×16 pixel image.

The best part of the site is the audio/video media page, lots of great audio tracks to listen to to hear the solo and ensemble playing. There’s one video there at the moment too, hopefully more to follow.

Classical Event Music page banner

If you want to book a great classical music live performance for your special event go and check out classicaleventmusic, listen to the samples and contact us using the form on the page.

CD cover for The Ebbs (UK) – Russian Skidoo

DRMark — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:51:58 +0000

The song ‘Russian Skidoo’ has been recorded since summer 2005, now I’ve only just got around to making the CD cover for it. I drew all the trees and snow textures on a background layer in Illustrator. Also in separate layers I drew the guy and the skidoo. That look a while, balancing the amount of detail to be sketched with what I wanted the finished article to be like.

Illustrating the shapes of the skidoo was no problem but it took three revisions to draw the helmet! The picture I was looking at had a guy with lots and lots of stickers on the helmet and I got too involved working close up and made something far too detailed, twice. This picture is of a guy speeding through the night in a snow storm so it’s not necessary at all to have that detail. Then when I finished I fired up Photoshop and used a combination of the motion blur and the wind tools. The snow wasn’t so tricky, inserting a new layer in Photoshop using the noise filter and distort filters to make it wavy, then altering the opacity of that layer.

The Ebbs (UK) - Russian Skidoo

I’m quite happy with the result, from the ingredients I started with. If I were to do it again I would focus on a detail of the skidoo, coming almost straight towards the viewer, perhaps looking like it’s about to run into the camera. Could do that for the back cover though… If it’s better it can be swapped with the front image! Sound clip here; The Ebbs (UK) – Russian Skidoo.

Cheers, Mark

Design for the music industry

DRMark — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:14:20 +0000

If I’ve got the time and inclination/inspiration I like to design CD covers for the space-rock band “The Ebbs (UK)”. If you go to the main Ebbs Studio site, then go to the music section there are 3 CD covers there with an accompanying MP3; a sample from the CD. I’ve designed several Ebbs CDs but not got music samples prepared for the webpage so they aren’t uploaded yet. On the other hand there are a few Ebbs songs without any CD cover yet. The music section is a bit bare so it needs updating, but so does everything, all the time in this digital age…

The Ebbs music CD covers currently available

If you are interested in CD and LP covers there is a great resource on the web which you might not know about – lpcoverlover.com. This is a great site with some of the most bizarre LP covers you have ever seen.