• Fig.1 - Back sleeve

  • Fig.1a - Cloud photo I took in London while on tour

  • Fig.2 - Liner page

  • Fig.3 - Logo

  • Fig.3a - Early concept

  • Fig.4 - Shirt

  • Fig.5 - Vinyl cover

  • Fig.6 - Color Of My Soul single cover

Pretty Lights 2013

By 2013 I had long since stopped doing client work to focus on music but once in a while a project would come up that seemed too fun to pass up. Pretty Lights’ A Color Map of the Sun was on of those projects. Derek approached me in the summer of 2012 about doing an album cover and over the next few months I worked up some concepts and bounced things back and forth. Fig.3a is one of the earlier versions, which I liked, but ultimately felt a little too dark / cyberpunk for the music. I kept the cityscape / highway theme but lightened up the imagery. The title was a placeholder as the final title for the album hadn’t yet been decided. I completed the project in March of 2013 and the album was released in July.

I remember I was way behind on the project and pushing up against the deadline for the vinyl manufacturing. I had planned a trip to visit my girlfriend (now wife) in Portland where she was going to school but had assumed this project would be complete by then.

This was before I had a laptop that could handle a project of this size (cover image alone is 9.02GB PSB) so I had to pack up my water-cooled desktop and drive up. While she was in class I worked on the project and finished just in time. She was staying with friends in a houseboat on the Willamette and they had a Zodiac boat. When I got stuck on something I would take it for a spin, dodging big ships and exploring the inlets. I’d always come back refreshed and inspired.