Monday, January 10, 2005

Demo and Outtake Covers

I downloaded the Green Updated Demos off EasyTree and thought it would be good to do a cover for them. I'd always had a simple concept I wanted to try for the demos and outtake discs and since a few of them had been recently posted I thought it was the opportune time.

I wanted to get away from using picture of the band all together on these ones. Cover designs are restricted by being able to find usable hi res images that suit the composition you're trying to create, you are, after all, a slave to your resources. So I thought I'd dictate the imagery on these ones. I didn't know how that would be accepted but the REM trading community that downloads my covers but I was interested to find out.

I'd always had the idea of doing free standing objects on a white plane or background. The initial idea I had was for the Green Outtakes. First of all I had to go with the obvious colour choice because it would just look dumb in anything else. In a way this helped a great deal with how I was to used colour on the whole series.

Green Demos Upgraded


For the Green cover I used some fantastic stock images of a waste bin, signifying versions that were binned and not used on the final. I designed the cover with the word 'outtakes' in mind. I was surprised when I re-read the notes and it was 'demos' which didn't quite suite the concept as well but I decide to continue with the design anyway.

I was really happy with the final result, the minimal use of imagery, typography and colour make the design very strong and simplistic and for those reason it's one of my favorites so far. I thought it was going to be a hard one to beat.


Lifes Rich Pageant Demos & More


For most of REM commercial albums I can think of an object I could probably use on a demo cover of this style, but for a while Lifes Rich Pageant puzzled me. I looked through some stock images of childrens toys and found some photos of old toy trains that jumped out at me. There is no real connection but they just seemed to go together.

I used a colour picker to select a shade of deep red of the toy on the cover to use as the colour for the text. As with the Green Demos cover this one turned out better than I expected although this one did receive some mixed reactions.



With this release there was a file of information with details on each track. To put all this information on the inlay would completely crowd the space and detract from the white open look I was trying to achieve. I thought what it needed was a gatefold booklet for the people who wanted the extra information. With a booklet I would have enough room for all the details without spoiling the look.

Outtakes of Time


This one I have mixed feelings about. I used green and red for the previous two cover so the obvious colour choice for this one was blue. I wanted to put a variety of time recording devices on here not only a clock, things like hourglasses or sundials.

For the cover I went through a large number of clock images until I found one I think worked. I think I subconsciously chose it because it reminds me of a clock we had in the room at my old high school.

For the inlay I didn't want another clock so I went with the only picture of an hourglass I could find. (Well I found a few but this was the only one that wasn't cropped and could be used on a white background.) Problem is I don't think it really works. It looks like its lifting off the page. The first two covers are very strong and I love them but this one I can't look at with the same affection. I'm doing another cover for another 'Out of Time' demo disc with a slightly different tracklist and I'll be using two different images for that that I hope will turn out better.

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