Cover Art Updates

A few updates to the cover art. I have replaced bill's bio picture. I have also swapped in the "roadside toothbrush" picture in the place of where the ice trucker pic USED to be down along the bottom.



I also fixed the color saturation on the nob hill pic. Famous.

As far as I can tell, this is pretty much done. I don't know of any other change controls that have been submitted, nor can I see any room for improvement myself.

New Liner Notes, with Updates

I have updated the text of the liner notes to reflect feedback from Mzzr Fischer. Every specific grammar/spelling/punctuation note was fixed. Almost all "suggestions" were attended to. Much re-wording all around.

Also removed "Above you". I forgot that we were not including that one.



Still need to do some updating of the pics.

BNB T-Conf

Today, Bill and I had a quick phone call to discuss progress on the album cover artwork. We reviewed the most recent versions of the artwork in real-time, and had a discussion about a few points I was interested in feedback on. Here are my notes from the phone call:

lighten up ice road trucker - make this the bio pc
ok with HDM text
REplace ice road trucker pic with a different
Bill will find something

Bio text from bill is complete.
Maybe color saturate nob hill

pull bill pic from roadside into foreground. Replace beach picture.

Pull out angels baseball from liner notes.

Get a serial number for the spine.
For CD on print, go with BNB colors pring

update website




This is a healthy little todo list that should keep me busy for a few hours. Updating the website will take the longest, but that will be fun. I have some existing templates that I can pour everything into. I'm sure it will roxor.

Ok, LAST one.

ONE last experiment with text placement for the album title. And no more. It's going to be a choice between one of the four posted. no more dorkin' around.



I think this one is actually my favorite.

And nunna that "there's something missing" bullSheeit either.

Experimenta-showne.

Got some fan feedback. And we all know how well fan feedback has served us in the past. Right?

Anywze, I fattened up the "Black and Blue" text, and took two different approaches to the "high Desert Mystery" text. Just messin' really. I don't want to over complicate this with too many options, but I thought it was worth pursuing.





AND, I did some color cleaning on the inside disk lable. nothing really fantastic, just a deeper black.

On Disk Artwork

Here are the two concepts I've got cooking for the on-disk artwork. I could go either way. With the artwork, that is. Sheesh.





Disregard the depth of the black. I'll fix that later. You get the idea.

Album Artwork Getting Closer

Here is the current state of the union for album cover artwork:








Couple of comments. In re-reading Bill's bio, I did make a couple editorial changes. When we first wrote those down, I was haphazardly taking dictation on my netbook while sitting in the hangar. It was more stream-of-consciousness, not polished text. So in reviewing it, I made a couple TINY changes to make it more prosaic, less rambling. You can compare it to earlier versions if you are curious about the changes.

The picture of bill on the bio page is still temporary.

The song order on the back tray is still temporary. I also added a "producer" credit for both Bill and I. For reference, I tend to list bill's name first for alphabetical consistency. Not because I think he's the boss of me. Which he is most certainly not.

Center fold out/liner notes is essentially done. The ONLY thing I struggle with is font. VERY tempting to use the same font that I use for the BNB logo and the bio page, but I fear that because the print is so small, it will become distorted upon print. A more straight-laced font will probably react better. Just a theory. Not sure. Also not sure if I care.

I am currently working on the on-disk print, which I am just going to make completely simple. Nothing terriffic. ALTHOUGH I am tempted to mirror the BNB logo that is on the background of the bio page. I thought that looked really good on the CD single, but Would it be considered re-hash if I did that?

Tray Card Updates

A few tiny tweaks to the tray card. As per my last post, I thickened up the song list text, and also offset the drop shadow a tiny bit. Just to make it more legible. I also re-did the grit filter, making a few changes to it so that it's a bit more unique. On a technical aside, I also resized it to properly fit the template. Previously it was just haphazardly placed on the template, with a few inches of bleed on one side. It's a little bit cleaner now



As with my previous comments, this is really pretty much where I want it to be, aside from final song order. I may make some tiny tweaks along the way just to make it a little cleaner, but the overall layout is right where I think it should be.

Tray Card Near Complete

Aside from final decision on song order, I believe this is just about done. I MAY thicken up the text a little on the song list. In fact, I think I will. Other than that, This is right about where I want it to be.

True Grit - Liner Notes Cont'd

A few tiny changes. I added the grit layer, which I think is cool and suits the theme of the album. I also added in a few more pictures along the bottom, and did some re-arranging. I'm sort of on the fence about some of the pics I selected, but they are all travel/adventure related. Though not necessarily desert related. I think I'm overthinking things.



Also made some minor changes to the text layout. Made the first "W" spacing a little different. Very biblical. Though not in proportion.

Liner Notes Update With Spellcheck

Here's the latest version of the liner notes. Includes a number of tiny spelling, capitalization and grammar changes. Nothing signficiant, just little clean ups. Is that even a word?

Liner Notes - This Time With Feeling

Looks like I forgot to attach the pic last time I posted about liner notes. Here it is.



And upon uploading it, I noticed a bunch of errors in the text. I will correct them.

Front Cover Art Updates

A bit more work finished on the front cover art. Added in text for our bios. The picture for ME is the final one, but Bills is temporary.



Please keep in mind for ALL of these work in progress photos that I am NOT removing the bleed. So there's additional artwork around the borders that will be chopped off after the printing process is complete.

Liner Note Thoughts

I'm sorry to say that it looks like the liner notes are going to be SEVERELY truncated in order to make them fit on the inside jacket. We wrote A LOT of text. I figure I will have to chop out about 75% of the text, just to make it fit. And that's pushing the lower limits of font size for the art work.

The GREAT news is that we can always publish the extended liner notes on the website, or on the blog. So the information will certainly not be lost. It just won't be printed on the album sleeve.

Liner Notes Polished

This is the 200th post to this blog! yay! I don't know what that even means, but I'm sure it's some kind of accomplishment.

I just finished up editing the liner notes for the album. And by "editing", i really just mean fixing grammar and typos. I didn't really make any editorial decisions, other than changing the voice in a few places. For example, the original text may have said something like "I recorded guitar on tuesday". This got changed to "Bill recorded guitar on tuesday".

I didn't introduce any new text or meaning to the narrative, just cleaned it up.

However, we wrote a LOT of stuff for the liner notes. I fear that I may have to chop some out, but that is pure speculation. I will find out more once I pour it into the artwork template. Either way, more progress has been made. My goal is to have all of the album cover artwork finished by the end of the month, pending song order.

Back Insert Almost Done

As with my previous post, this is an update on the current state of the album artwork.

This is the back page. This is includes the spine.



There's really very little different between this and some of the concept art I posted a while back. Main difference is that this was all laid out in Adobe Illustrator in high res CMYK. There's a few tiny tweaks, and the song list is not final, but this is pretty close. I'm still on the fence about whether or not to use a "dirty filter" over the entire image, just to add some sandy-grain type noise to it. i think I WILL go with it, but that will be the very last thing I do.

There's also still a little bit of work to do to make sure the text is legible. It's gotta POP! woohoo!!

Album Artwork Nearing Completion

I am done with the design of the cover artwork. Now I am just assembling it all together in a high res format with the text being left as vectors. I'm doing this in adobe illustrator. it's really just a process of recreating what I did previously in photoshop.

Here's where it stands as of this very second.



Disregard the big blue blob on the left. That's just a place holder.

Anyhow, I may do some last minute tweaks on the placement of the little photos, but as of right now, this is pretty much what it's going to look like.