CD covers

These are custom CD covers I made. This is something I did as far back as when I was a teenager, but I haven't done it regularly for a very long time and I'm trying to get back to doing it more now. I spend a lot of time looking at and thinking about album cover design and I think it's a good way to engage with my favourite music and stay creative. Might also be a good way to make use of some assorted photos down the line that don't quite stand on their own.

Most of the time I would do single covers for songs that haven't been released as a single. I love artwork for singles that takes the design language of the album art and reapply it in a new way and perhaps even adapts to the themes of the song, and that's what I try to do here.

Chumbawamba - Add Me

This is just the same layout as the The Boy Bands Have Won cover but with the hook of Add Me instead. Feel like this song was as close to being an unofficial single as you can get anyways. This is the original album font but unfortunately I don't remember what it was called, sorry!

Chumbawamba - Big Mouth Strikes Again

This cover came to me in a dream. I dreamt I was in a record store and found this as a 10-inch, and woke up and recreated it. This is a sloppy mock-up, as I very obviously didn't do the work to track down any of the required assets to do it properly. The Chumbawamba logo and the image are just taken from the Shhh cover which does not exist in super high resolution, and the font I used to write the title is pretty far off to the one used on the album. I do love the composition and authentic feel of it though.

Chumbawamba - That's How Grateful We Are

The image is taken from the original Slap! booklet and has also been reused on the cover of the Shhhlap! compilation and the current iteration of the band's website. I was going for a similar layout to the I Never Gave Up single with white background and a black and white photo in the middle. I like what I was going for here but the font choice was bad, does not feel very authentic to the early 90s and the designs the band were going for at the time.

Chumbawamba - The Good Ship Lifestyle

Pretty simple one, felt inspired by the commanding presence of Dunstan when performing the song. The Tubthumper design scheme is so simple and striking and I always thought it was a shame that only the Amnesia single made use of it.

Mr. Bungle - Goodbye Sober Day

California is another album with a very simple and striking cover, and I had the idea to just switch out the graphic and change up the colour schemes to fit the theme of the songs. For Goodbye Sober Day I went for a stock milky way graphic. Originally I just wanted to just make the background black, but I played around with some hues and throwing some assorted grainy night sky photo in there for texture and really love how it came out.

Mr. Bungle - Retrovertigo

One of Mr. Bungle's most iconic songs. I originally thought of some other tracks to apply the base idea from Goodbye Sober Day to but I thought if there's any song from this album that should've been a single it's Retrovertigo. I went for a different approach here and tried to represent the feeling of vertigo through a text-layout based design and played around with some textures just like I did on the other Bungle one. The font I used is called Huxley Vertical, by the way. I am fairly confident it's the original font, or it's at least close enough that you don't notice the difference.