Separation Anxiety
So you just realized you don't know the first thing
about designing your album cover. Now what?
by Keith Snyder
STEP ONE: DESIGNING
Here's the basic rule: choose a designer the same way you'd choose a musician for a session. Do you like her work? Did someone you know have a good experience with her? Does she seem to understand when you talk? Does she speak English to you, or does she rattle off graphics terms without explanation? Can you afford her? Expensive designers are not necessarily more talented or more capable than less expensive ones, just like session musicians.
When you meet a designer for the first time, ask to view her "book." (That's her portfolio, a book or oversized briefcase-looking thing that holds samples of jobs she's done in the past.) Ask anything you like about the contents of the book: budgets, turnaround times, the extent of her responsibilities on each job, how many people worked on particular projects, whatever you think of. Get a sense of whether you "click" with her.
Ask questions about your project. Request a bid. Don't expect to get it that day, since the designer will have to figure out how many hours she will probably be sinking into the job and get quotes from any necessary subcontractors (photographers, illustrators, etc.). Some designers wear more than one hat, so if she claims to do photography in addition to design, ask to see samples of her photo work. Don't be bashful; these are reasonable questions.
Expect to pay a percentage up front. It's usually done in either halves or thirds, though there's no hard-and-fast rule. For jobs over a couple of thousand dollars, I usually get one-third up front, one-third when the client approves a rough design, and one-third on delivery. For jobs less than that, I usually do halves (half up front, half upon delivery). There are exceptions; when I'm working with a client I know pays on time, I'll often accept a single payment upon delivery.
Which brings us to money. You could spend anywhere from nothing (an art student loves your music and will do the design in exchange for the experience and a few dozen finished pieces) to several thousand dollars (photo sessions, illustrations, fold-out doodads, die-cuts, strange inks, exotic varnishes, hand-woven palm frond cases). It's up to you. A good designer in Los Angeles will charge anywhere from $40 to $80 per hour.
Your designer should be able to recommend a printer. It's also possible that you'll get a good printing deal from the CD manufacturer (as well as other peripheral things, such as stuffing the booklets into the jewel boxes and shrink-wrapping), so bring this up with your designer. If she hasn't done album covers before, she might not know that.
Have the designer include all costs in her bid, including the cost of proofs and any outside services. If you want the designer to handle everything, including dealing with having the job printed (a good idea if you're not familiar with print), ask for that to be built into the bid. Also agree on how many "go-rounds" of changes to the design you are entitled to.
If you were to ask designers what their clients could do to save time and money, the most common response would be "Avoid making changes, and if you have to, make them as early in the project as possible."
Say your name is in big green letters at the top of the CD booklet, and it's misspelled. Say it's missing a "W." Say you don't notice until you're at the printer's, standing next to the press, looking at the final color proof before the pressman starts the print run. It will cost you hundreds of dollars to take the job off the press, add the "W" on the computer, output four more pieces of film, make another color proof, and put the job back on the press.
Say, instead, that you notice the misspelling the first time the designer hands you a rough black and white proof from the laser printer. It will cost you absolutely nothing to have the designer go to the computer and insert the missing "W." The later in the design process you make changes, the more it will cost. For that reason, always proofread carefully. Take your proof into a quiet room and read it several times, checking it against your own text, if you have any. Do this every time you are given a proof &emdash; sometimes things that were correct become incorrect due to designer error or software screwups. Use standard proofreading marks if you want to be understood, make a Xerox of your marked-up proof, request a new proof showing the changes, and check that all the indicated changes were made. This is your responsibility, and if you miss spelling errors or other text changes, they're your problem. Designers are not proofreaders. If they notice something, they should say so, but don't count on them for proofreading. It's not their job, and not something they're necessarily good at.
Anyway, back to the nuts and bolts of the design process. Once you've hired a designer, the first thing is to have a meeting and kick ideas around. You may already have some ideas, and you should describe them. The designer will probably be able to tell you which of your ideas will be expensive, which will be more reasonable, and (though you may not like it), which have been done six thousand times this week by every band in town. This is part of why you hired this designer; she knows this stuff, and you don't. She's seen a few hundred album covers with long-haired rock bands squatting on railroad tracks (and a few thousand more with that red graffiti lettering that was kind of interesting when Michael Jackson used it last decade) and so have your potential buyers. Listen to her. She's a designer and you're a musician.
At the end of your meeting, there should be some indication of what to expect when you meet next. It's not inappropriate to ask for, say, three rough sketches of potential directions. Set a meeting date. A couple of weeks is reasonable time for the designer to get something together for you.
At the second meeting, you might spend a while discussing what isn't right with the sketches. Or you might see one that jumps out, grabs you by the throat, and says, "Me! Me! I'm the album cover you want!" Either way, the meeting should end with a more definite direction.
And that's pretty much the way the rest of the process will go. You'll talk with the designer, and then the designer will go away and then come back with what you talked about.
Be honest during these meetings. Allowing things to go in the wrong direction will cost you plenty of money if you finally decide to speak up with fundamental changes around the time things should be in their final stages. You may have to pay for a whole new job. Don't forget that the designer works for you, and you are entitled to receive the product you want. Imagine that you're in a recording session and the guitar player plays in the wrong style the whole time, and you don't say anything. Of course, you'll still have to pay him his agreed fee, and then you'll have to pay for a whole new session. It's the same thing. Speak up. Don't be a jerk about it, but do speak up.
Remember also that if you decide to buy that new boat after all, and put off the whole CD project until next year, you are responsible for paying the designer for any work she's done to that point. Ask for a final invoice and pay it.
STEP TWO: PRINTING
There are a couple of ways to get the finished design out of the computer and onto ink and paper. One, which I prefer, is to give the printer a floppy disk (or a SyQuest cartridge, if the project is large) and have the printer output film. Film is what the printer uses to put ink onto paper. You can't simply press "PRINT" on your computer and have the offset press lumber into action. (It's coming, but it's not here yet. Until then, film is required for printing.)
Another way to work is to give the floppy disk to a "service bureau" (a company which specializes in outputting from a computer), have them print the film, and then give that film to the printer.
The reason I like to give the disk straight to the printer, and not use a service bureau at all, is that it keeps all the responsibility in one place. The printer can't blame the film for anything, since the printer is the one who output the film in the first place. It's a simpler "signal path," so to speak. Any problem is either with the designer or with the printer, and whoever is at fault is responsible for fixing it. In Los Angeles, I don't know of any printers who don't have computer capabilities.
When the printer (or service bureau) outputs film, it's just like when you print a document on your laser printer or dot matrix printer, except that instead of one piece of paper coming out, four pieces of film come out. The reason there are four pieces of film is that most color printing (and there are plenty of exceptions) is done with four inks. If you were to go get a color magazine or album cover, and look at it through a magnifying glass, you'd see that although the pictures seem to have many, many colors to them, they're all actually made up of little dots of only four colors of ink: cyan (sky blue), magenta (pinkish), yellow, and black. Designers and printer refer to these as CMYK. ("K" refers to black because if you said "B," it might be mistaken for "blue.") There's a complicated physics explanation for why these four colors are used, which has to do with their complimentary relationships to the primary colors of light, but you don't need to worry about that and, frankly, neither does your designer.
The four pieces of film are called separations, because they separate artwork into four colors: CMYK. (Here I should mention, briefly, that some computer art programs work in RGB mode. RGB stands for Red Green Blue, the primary colors of light. For complex reasons, RGB and CMYK have different color gamuts. That is, although their "sets of possible colors" overlap to a great degree, there are some colors that are possible in RGB and not CMYK, and vice versa. To make things worse, not only do some computer art programs use this color mode, but all color computer monitors do. The upshot is this: If you're creating your own computer artwork, don't expect what shows up on the screen to match the colors that end up printed on paper. Talk to your designer about it. She has ways of figuring these things out.)
If the design is done entirely on the computer, the film output from the computer is ready to be used to print your job. If, however, there are photos or artwork that are not on the computer, the printer must photograph them with a special process that results in four pieces of film (CMYK), which the printer then combines with the film from the computer.
You'll notice, if you look at the booklets in your CD collection, that the inside of the booklet is often done in only one or two colors. This saves you money on film and ink. (It also changes some of the details of my previous explanation of printing color from film.) If you want more colors on the inside, that's your decision (ask your designer for advice), but if all you're printing there is lyrics and credits, and maybe a few black and white photos, there often seems to be little reason to use more than just black ink. My opinion is that you are better off spending your money (and your designer's time) on the front and back covers, since they're what gives buyers and distributors their first impression of your album.
Make sure your designer includes a press check in her bid. That means that when your job begins to run on the big offset press, the designer will be right there to spot problems and correct them before your whole job runs. The pressman will print one or two of your booklets and give them to the designer for an okay before running the rest of the job. If the job runs and it turns out there was a black speck right on your nose on the front cover, and nobody was there to do a press check, you can either re-run the job (for more money, of course) or draw a black speck on your real nose so it matches the CD cover.
There are lots of variables in these kinds of projects, and your particular print job might be completely different from what I've described, but a more-or-less usual CD booklet project should resemble what you've just read. And if you've got a print design or multimedia project coming up, please feel free to call.
Keith Snyder is the principal designer of Woolly Mammoth, a Southern California print and multimedia design company.
