Initial concepts
After a few false starts, the very first idea we had was that we would incorporate images of retro technology into the artwork, so I spent some time over Christmas 2007 taking photos of old tapes, floppy discs, and vinyl, like this one which you might recognise from the Remission sleeve:
Not having taken the time to find any sheets for the background or light the images properly inevitably meant we had to diminish the quality of the images somewhat before we could use them for anything, but soon we were coming up with concepts such as this:
I chose the silhouette of myself from the original Here Comes the Summertime video, although we played with a few other ideas too. At some point the waveform concept made its way in, as well (note the album title Distance - I don't remember if this was ever seriously considered, but it would have been quite a good name).
By late 2010, we had a relatively clear idea of what the visual style might be, but we still weren't quite sure how to fit all the ideas together, so a brief sidestep took us to what I called the "squares concept", trying to build a sleeve using evenly spaced images laid out across the page:
From this you can see we gained the centrepiece, replacing the actual cut-out vinyl section, where somehow the cassette spindle seemed to fit the bill rather nicely. This would become one of the key parts of the album imagery.
Better Days
Once the album was almost complete, we decided that Better Days was would be the first release, and we wanted to keep it relatively simple, so we just went with the arm waving image on the 12" sleeve, without too much processing, so that you should still just about be able to tell that it's taken from a real photo.My only regret is the choice of colour - I'm not sure why we never changed if from that foul shade of vomit green which you can see on some of the early conceptual versions above. But never mind...
Transmission
There were some quite effective early versions of the album sleeve floating around in early 2011, such as this one:
Which actually works quite nicely in its minimalism (and no, that wasn't ever going to be the album title). I was keen to use the image of Simon, because I really like it, but that was vetoed. Somewhere along the line, it lost the 12" photo backdrop, and gained the floppy disc pieces instead:
Finally, within a couple of weeks we had added the waveform (that's me saying "transmission," in case you were wondering) and the simulated interference pattern, and we had a completed album sleeve, although we weren't too sure about the colour:
We had already had a "green" album (2002's Zero), and so we wanted to try something different. Another early attempt used a colour called "grandma's refridgerator," mainly just because we liked the name:
But finally we ended up with the bold blue colour, and since we had never even had a blue single before, let alone an album, this definitely seemed the way to go:
With the album sleeve complete, we had what we thought was a strong visual style for the album, something worthy of following up the Dusk sleeves of which we were also very proud. We just needed to ensure we could keep up the theme for the rest of the album releases.
You can listen to Transmission here.
You can listen to Transmission here.
In part 2 of this post, next week, we'll share some of the concepts and final designs for the early Transmission singles.
