Some time ago I told a friend of mine, Tomasz, that whenever he was going to publish a new CD, I would like to be the one who designs it. Some time ago he worked on new material for a record called “Fusionland”. This is the cover design that I delivered.

My idea to illustrate “Fusionland” was to use something simple but interesting. I decided to go for contour lines, which can usually be found on maps. I wanted the possible buyers to be able to imagine what kind of music Tomasz is making, that is why some of the contour lines on the front side have labels with music genres which influenced him to make the new record. Apart from that other lines have no labels, so people can imagine what this Fusionland would look like in real life (hopefully while listening to “Fusionland” in their stereo system).

Tomasz asked me for two pictures of him to be featured on the front and on the back of the cover. It was important for Tomasz to stand next to his drum kit, so people would now he is a drummer. I took the pictures in a concert hall with a lot of help of a light technician, who set up the lights and also added some smoke from the smoke machine.

Here you can see the outside of the cover (top) and the inside (bottom). The cover is a standard 6-panel digipak.

Tomasz gave me another challenge – a pretty long document containing all the thank-you’s and a description of the music. He was very particular about it. This made me search for a good choice of typography. For the main title and the words which are in bold I used a free font League Spartan, for the rest of the text I used Source Sans which is very legible even in small size. Another thing I did to cram more text in was to divide each column of text into two.

The project however evolved. I spoke with the publisher and he managed to convince Tomasz that his face on the back of the cover would be enough and to stick to the colour scheme I changed the back photo to black and white.

I also added some more contour lines and worked on details. This version was accepted both by Tomasz and the publisher. This led me to make a mockup for promotional purposes and I was also tasked to make some visuals for the promomix. Here it is:

Tomasz and I believed that the b/w version of the cover went to print, but in the end we received this:

Well… Nevertheless, it was fun!

Thanks for the opportunity Tomasz!