Here’s a book cover for a project which began in 2022, albeit undergoing lots of small design tweaks as the book itself came together. At the start, a cover was needed quite quickly to focus minds and I settled on a title which included the word Bizarre. I thought the old Victorian-style decorated lettering and vibe reflected the esoteric nature of many of the sleeves in the book and was happy to license some, but nobody seems to have really good original digitised fonts of this sort of material and my collection of type books don’t go back that far sadly!
Even image library versions were clearly off poor second hand sources and worse than those floating around on the web, so I resorted to grabbing a few different alphabets. Once I had chosen the individual letters (including two different fonts for the letter R), put some time into cleaning and restoring each one. I could then produce a master of the word Bizarre, and from there generate different coloured versions. By overlaying these slightly out of register I got a good strong image and then used plainer type for the rest of the title to help it stand out.
Behind the book titles I went with and montage of sleeves which had already been photographed. As the project progressed, we got proper scans of each sleeve and so were able to improve the quality considerably – and discovered one I had included on that first cover visual was a fake anyway! I like to keep track of progress but recently found I had deleted this early visual somewhere along the way (happily it was saved on the Mac time machine facility – see above).
One feature of many older vinyl sleeves, especially those from America, is the ring wear which seemed worth making a feature of the final design. I scanned a worn old 12” black disco bag (yes, I have a few knocking about!) and layered this over the cover montage. It is quite subtle, indeed you may not even notice it, but it unifies the montage. I liked the result so introduced it as a subtle tinted background on the inside pages throughout the book as well.
The subtitles took ages to fix as they kept fighting with the colours off the sleeves. The only answer was to add a slight outline to these (above). We also had to deal with a late change of the book title and a late quote from the provider of the book’s foreword, which entailed yet another afternoon trying to add this while keeping a good overall balance. Despite all the text the covers still show enough of their strangeness to invite people’s curiosity, at least that’s the hope.
The back is the only place to get across to customers what the book is about (especially as many shops shrink-wrap stock these days), so it is very busy. The image of the fitness sleeve became the background (with all text off the sleeve edited off) overlaid with the publicity text, barcode and other necessary details. Along the way I thought it would be good to reference those annoying “parental” stickers the Americans foisted on the world too. Amongst all this are squeezed thumbnails of more sleeves and in all the back juggles over a dozen images. Record Collector had already reviewed the book but this was embargoed; however they were kind enough to give us a quote to use so I was able to include that before it went to print. I then ran the Bizarre logo as large as I could up the side of the cover, added the ring wear again and a gentle graded colour wash to finish things off.
It is an astonishing collection! More details on the publisher’s site.
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