I've been working on a couple new freelance projects. I don't want to reveal too much about them yet but below is a little piece of one of them that I'm having fun with.

It's for an album cover that I'm designing and illustrating. I love creating album covers probably because music fuels so much of what I do with art. Whether the art is directly used in the music industry or I just have my favorite tunes playing while I work I feel a strong connection between the two.

I think it goes without saying that the cover art for an album is very important. A good album cover communicates a lot about the music before a person even hears it. On a few occasions, before previewing music was as easy as it is today, I purchased CDs without hearing a lick of the music. Usually I had read good reviews of it so I had some idea what I was getting myself into but I can think of at least one occasion when I took the $15 gamble on an album and scored a life-long favorite. From there I became a fan of the band and tried to get everything they produced within reason. Not that it matters to my story but that band was "Man or Astro-Man?" and I still dig their music about 19 years later. Here is that album cover.

I couldn't find this exact selection on iTunes but if you click the image you can sample another one from about the same era.

So, maybe other people aren't crazy enough to buy music based solely on the packaging like me but we are all effected in some way by the visual aspect of the whole package. My goal when working on this kind of project is to make the music stand out enough that people give it a listen and a fair chance. That's a tall order in our visually saturated world but I'll keep trying.