Raising standards
For six years, I have designed CD packaging for Delphian Records. As their first professional designer, I set the house style that is still used in all their packaging. The clarity and creativity of design has won them recognition and new business.
The title piece of this recording of avant-garde organ music was inspired by a poem that draws parallels between the blitzing of London in the second world war and Christ‘s crucifixion. The idea of spikes falling like bombs inspired my cover art.
François Couperin drew inspiration from the lives of the courtiers for whom he played. Flowers floating in black seemed an appropriate image to suggest the elegance and intrigue of court life. I created the image by scanning cut flowers covered by a black cloth.
As a composer, structure preoccupied Oliver Messiaen. I used colour-boxes to distinguish the different information on the cover and reveal the baseline structure of the typography.
Although dominated by a photograph of the composer in Jerusalem, during the period when the music was written, I am particularly pleased with the simple typography and composition I arrived at for this cover. The colours of the type are taken from the stained wood of the 1970s Rieger Organ used in the recording.
Mark O’Keeffe often accompanies his music with performance art. I rotated a photograph of him lying on the floor while playing a concert so that he appears in a riding position, as the ‘Knight Errant’.
The title track of this recording of modern music is a setting of a poem about Scottish fishermen lost at sea. To capture the raw, bleak tenor of the music I overlaid two different, high contrast, exposures of a photograph of cliffs from the coast of Scotland. The mid-tones were printed in silver, and the shadows in black.
The experimental cover typography was inspired by the experimental compositions of the four composers featured on this disc.
