This week was crazy. Both Leah and I are beyond slammed with work and to boot, we are trying to paint, fix-up and move into our new house. Also this week was a big one for a recent project of mine that I am extremely proud of. This week was the release of Manchester Orchestra’s new CD/LP “Mean Everything To Nothing” which I did the design/layout and some of the photos for. Back in January I got a call from my friend Jeremiah (drummer) with this idea in his head for the new Manchester record. He wanted to use old Polaroid pull apart film to do transfers and the transfers would make up the artwork of the record. I was initially hired on to just help him do the transfers and photos, but as things went along, I ended up getting the job to do the full layout.
Jeremiah and I spent many days doing all sorts of crazy things with 12 packs of Polaroid 669 film. For a while we tried EMULSION LIFTS which are cool, but a pain in the butt. (it pretty much involves boiling the photo and the image separates itself from the paper on a thin piece of gelatin.) Finally, one day, while trying to find the ‘perfect’ cover image, I found a transfer we did and put in the TRASH pile. some of the chemicals bonded to the paper and pulled up when you pull back the Polaroid. Somehow at 2nd glance, I knew this would be the cover. Did some clever editing… and BOOM. The cover was born.
Somehow along the way I decided, that since we’re doing a very manual process for the images, why not make everything else I do with the layout HARDER. I purchased some old wooden letterpress Typefaces and blocks and set all the cover, track listing and numbers by hand with these old letters. I also made the lyric layouts harder than they should be too. Needless to say, it was a very time consuming project, but after I saw the finished product, I knew it was time well spent. When I saw the CD I was extremely happy. When I saw the LP this past weekend…. I had a smile on my face I couldn’t wipe off.
Next Wednesday Night Manchester Orchestra will be on Letterman and Dave will be holding up the LP; my artwork. That’ll be a awesome moment for me.
Oh… also too, the record is really really really good. I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of their last record, but this new one is absolutely fantastic. I expect great things from it. Do yourself a favor and check it out, if not buy it for the artwork.
Looks great Brian!!! You got some mad Skills!