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Roll Another Phat One!

Over the years, I have created dance/trance compilation CD’s of my own track listings for myself or friends. Unfortunately for me, I have never created artwork for these albums, because mainly I quickly create a CD for the car, or I just haven’t got the time so therefore I never ended up creating one.

After all this time, I have finally created a series of CD artwork. When I tend to make CD’s, I always label them “Roll Another Phat One!”, which is Radio 1′s Dave Pearce unofficial slogan. The actual meaning of the phase is to roll another fat joint, but in context of club music, it means to play another tune, usually trance in genre.

Dance compilation album design usually consists of either three elements: 1) Some sexy female model, 2) Neon laser effects or/and 3) bright colours. Sorry to say, I didn’t have access to high-res photo’s of female models, but I didn’t want to go down that road anyway; I wanted to break away from the norm. I wanted to use some form of stock photography, plenty of white space and gorgeous typography; in effect, keeping it clean, simple and safe.

Roll Another Phat One! (CDs 1 – 3)
But what stock photography to use? I wanted to use something that was interesting and physically appealing. I thought about using flowers, but thought that there was no direct connection to dance music, and also it was to ‘soft’. I thought about using people doing various activities, but again, no direct connection. I finally came up with the idea to use buildings and forms of architectural design. The reason being is that humans have always been fasincated with buildings and their design. I felt that buildings have more association with dance music than say flowers, so the quest was on to come up with a series of photos that were both visual appealing and a good use of colour.

The two main stock photography libraries on the Internet are Digital Vision and Getty Images. I browsed they libraries and choose to images that I thought were the best.

Roll Another Phat One! (CDs 4 – 7)
When it came to issue 4 of the series, it was the time to change the design to a modern fresh look. Still using Digital Vision, I went for the abstract 3D model fresh look. The reason behind this look was to reflect the type of music that was on the CD. Dance music has a preception of being modern, so I thought that these two styles coincide with one another.

Roll Another Phat One! (CDs 7 – 12″)
Again, when issue 7 of the CD was ready I wanted to continue with the abstract design style, but unfortunately Digitial Vision no longer existed, so the artwork catelog was no longer available. This was an incentive to change the design style once again. This time around, I went back to photography and I chose the theme of paradise for the design. For the source of the photography, I used iStockphoto. It was just a simple task of using the keyword search engine and picking the most appealing image.