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Case study 06 · Concept · Design · Photography · Print production

Six panels, three tries at one of them, and no undo.

Two commercially released records for AM-I-AM — photography, sleeve design and print production. The only object on this door you can hold.

Everything else here renders. This got cut, folded and glued. A screen design can be fixed after it ships and a print run cannot — which changes what the file has to carry before it leaves: where the blade lands, how far the picture runs past it, and which panel ends up against which when the thing is folded.

The credit is printed on the back of both records, so it is quoted here rather than claimed: “Photography & Sleeve Design: Christopher Ward.”

Two records

The Love Out Loud album cover: the Teton range at dusk mirrored in still water, a starburst forming the I in the AM-I-AM wordmark, meteor streaks across a deep blue sky.
Love Out LoudSeven tracks, barcode 780977641000. Tetons at dusk, mirrored.
The Into the Light album cover: a couple walking away down an empty pier, a yellow center line running to the horizon, pale blue sky, the AM-I-AM wordmark above.
Into the LightEleven tracks. One road, one line, and the whole frame pointed down it.

The panel that was tried three ways

The inside-left panel carries the Special Thanks — a long block of small type that has to stay readable over a photograph. Three treatments were built and one shipped. The prairie is the prettier picture and the worse panel: the type sits in the busiest part of the frame and the horizon cuts through it. The cloud break has somewhere for the words to go.

The Special Thanks panel over a break in heavy cloud, a shaft of light crossing the upper left, the type falling in the open lower area.
shippedThe cloud break. The bright opening takes the top; the type gets the quiet half.
The same Special Thanks text over a prairie of tall grass at sunset, the horizon line crossing behind the middle of the type block.
not usedThe prairie. A better photograph and a worse panel — the horizon runs straight through the text.

The file that goes to the printer

The job's spec chip: a CMYK registration mark beside the words 6PAN1T, 6 Panel Digipak, 1 Tray (Center or Right), Adobe InDesign, 08/31/11 mk. A plant does not ask for a picture, it issues a template — and the template is the brief. It names four things the artwork has to satisfy at once: bleed, trimline, safety and fold. The chip rides along so the file states back what job it is: 6PAN1T — 6 Panel Digipak, 1 Tray (Center or Right), set in InDesign.

A digipak is not six pictures, it is one sheet that gets folded. So the layout is built as a spread with the inside panels upside down, because that is how they land when the thing closes. The panel names are set into the artwork — FRONT COVER, BACK COVER, TRAY GOES HERE OR INSIDE RIGHT — so nobody at the plant has to guess.

The full six-panel digipak layout as one sheet: three panels across and two down, the upper row printed upside down, trim marks at every corner, and the panel names set into the artwork.

One sheet, six panels, folded once. The upper row is inverted on purpose — that is which way up those panels sit after the fold — and the spine reads INTO THE LIGHT down the middle. The hairlines at every corner are the trim, where the blade lands, and the photographs deliberately run past them: a millimeter of drift on the cutter then still gives you ink to the edge instead of a white sliver. The chip sits at the foot, and beside it the note saying where to paste the approval tag.
measured, not assumedThe single panels declare 3.2 mm of bleed per edge beyond trim. Everything is RGB — sRGB IEC61966-2.1, no CMYK anywhere — and no file declares a press condition, so this is the working layout rather than a certified press file. Read out of the PDFs, not off a memory.

The disc-face layout: the plant's UD100 template with a spec chip and a block for naming each color pass, the disc drawn as a solid outer ring with dashed safety rings and a mirror band around the center hole, and the AM-I-AM wordmark with the words Love Out Loud placed inside the printable area on white.

The disc, on the plant's own guides. The solid ring is the disc; the dashed rings are the safety and the mirror band, which is bare plastic and takes no ink. Art has to live between them.
the decisionEverything else in this package is saturated — deep blue cover, a gold credits panel — and the disc is white with a mark and a title on it. The block at top right is where each color pass gets named, and a disc is not a photograph surface: it is a few passes of ink on a mirror. So the disc does not try to be the cover. It carries the one element that has to survive being read at arm's length in a tray.

The credit

The back panel carries the personnel, and it is where the claim on this page comes from rather than from a portfolio caption. Photography and sleeve design. It says nothing about the wordmark, and neither does this page — the star through the “I” is the best idea in the piece and I am not certain I made it.

The credits panel: the band silhouetted on a ridge against a burning gold sky, with the full personnel list, the recording studio, and the line Photography and Sleeve Design by Christopher Ward.

Recorded at Telekon Studios, Scottsdale. Mastered by Brian Lucey at Magic Garden. AM-I-AM is Daniel & Joy Willett.

My role — concept, photography, sleeve design and print production.
Client — AM-I-AM. Two six-panel digipaks, both commercially released.
Not my work — the wordmark. The printed credit names photography and sleeve design, and stops there.

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