Album Art for Darren Borg - Moments
I have been asked once again to create album art for one of my all-time favorite electronic artists Darren Borg. Having created the artwork for his previous two releases, 2012's The Beginning and the End and 2013's The Restoration of Abbie's I was very excited to have the chance to complete a trilogy with Darren. The first piece was based on a microscopy photo, the second a play on the vastness of space and time so I wanted to place this cover here and now and in our human scale. It just so happened that Darren wanted to name the album Moments and the first thing I thought of was seeing that term in the Apple Photos App on a daily basis so I knew I had to start with a photo... And having already used blue for the first cover and red/yellow for the second, I knew I wanted to go green.
While on a family outing through downtown Seattle, my wife driving, my 12 year old daughter shotgun and my 20-month old son and I in the middle row of our mini van I snapped a photo of the skyline through the rainy window.
Seattle from the backseat...
I enhanced the photo and put a filter on it in the native camera app and sent it to Darren to see if it spoke to him in any way... He said he loved it and was very interested to see what I would do with it. My first thought was to use the app Decim8 which is a great photo glitch app that yields really interesting results so I went to the App Store to download it and randomly came across an app called D3LTA which looked interesting. After playing around with it for awhile I came up with several different versions of the photo which I then manipulated in Photoshop to get to the proper dimensions for an album cover.
The trick to obtaining intricate results with D3LTA is running the filtered photo through the filter a second or third or fourth time...
Now here is the trick when working with clients... don't show them all of the versions that you make right away... only show them your top 2 or three at first. Every time I have broken this rule the client has chosen my least favorite design and I have had to finish out the project with less enthusiasm than I might have had otherwise. In this case I picked only 3 of the 12 designs to send to Darren, all of which I really liked. The nice thing about having the rest of these designs on hand, especially for album art, is that they can be used for other things, like the other pages in the digital booklet for liner notes or stickers, posters, gig flyers, Facebook headers, webpage graphics, etc...
So Darren picked his favorite and it was time to do the typography. Because I had already established a typographic style with the last two albums I immediately went to using that style as a default... I mean this was album three in the series so the typography had to be the same right? The more I pushed the text around the page I just kept feeling like it was not the way to go. I decided to choose a different typeface and style the text differently to fit better with the design that Darren had picked out. It didn't take very long for the final design to reveal itself... Darren is very happy with the final result and I am too...
Darren Borg Moments - Album art by Kurt Lorenz
You can learn more about the album and and get links to downloads from www.embermusic.com.
