We don’t do as much music package design as we did in the old days. (When we opened our firm in 1993, almost 80% of our design work was done for record companies.) Album cover design was a big reason why the design scene in Music City became so vibrant. During our first several years, we did hundreds of Country and Gospel covers for Capitol records, DreamWorks, EMI, MCA, Benson, StarSong, and other labels. Since then, the whole music biz has changed a lot. When budgets kept shrinking, we moved on to doing original poster art, branding and other adventures in design.
Several months ago, we got a call from Yamaha Music asking us to create the CD packaging for Nathan East. He is probably the most famous musician that you might not know. In addition to being a fabulous bass player, composer and all around musician, he has recorded, performed and co-written songs with performers such as Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, Joe Satriani, George Harrison, Phil Collins, Stevie Wonder, Toto, Daft Punk, and Herbie Hancock.
We assigned the job to our in-house design star, Edward Patton who totally got into the groove. After looking through hundreds of photos, he settled on a few choice images and enhanced them with painted textures, marrying the imagery with typography, making the whole vibe look a lot like the how the music sounds.
The resulting package design was one of our favorite projects ever. As cool as this album cover looks, the music is SO much better! We highly recommend that you rush out and buy a copy of it right now.
