One of the interesting things about running your own record label is the amount of stuff you try doing yourself, like laying out album covers.
I wasn’t sure I had the skills or time to do it, but I thought I’d give it a go. I had an idea for a simple design based on an old tuning signal used by the ITA in the UK in the early 1960s. It would need a vector drawing package and something like Photoshop to create the artwork for the cassettes and CDs – or so I thought.
I did look at using Adobe Creative Cloud stuff – but it looked like an awful lot to learn. So I revisited Pixelmator, which I already had and it was a revelation.
I had somehow managed to miss that Pixelmator has a vector drawing mode – simply hold down Shift Cmd V to enter (or leave) Vectormator mode. At which point you see a menu of shapes. I started with a circle.
Here you see a black circle with a 20px stroke and grey fill colour. When you create a shape, it creates a new layer for it – so it’s useful to label your layers with something meaningful.
I wanted a colourbar strip, so I created a white square and then duplicated it a few times. Then changed the colour of each one and lined them up together. To make this easier, I switched on the grid and zoomed in.
Once I had the whole colourbar of 8 squares, I selected them all and grouped them together and labelled the group. I could then move the whole lot around in one go.
I did a similar thing for the grating on the top right – a set of dark grey lines. I created a small A7 logo using a black square, white circle and another black circle on top of that, slightly squashed down.
The finished CD cover looked a bit like this:
The handy thing about this approach is you can switch on and off different elements, or move them around to suit different layouts. I found it easy to rejig things when doing the cassette or web site graphics. For example, I used a larger circle and extra text layer for the back of the CD with the track listings in the middle of it.
Pixelmator snaps in a user-friendly manner so getting things lined up or centred is literally, umm, a snap.
Features worth trying (if you haven’t already)
- Vectormator mode
- Layers – and grouping them
- Viewing the grid
All this stuff is covered in their help.
Hope this was useful. Obviously I’m not a graphic designer, but this simple layout suited my purposes. Pixelmator is brilliant. I even used it for the video graphics.