Slowboater
Software: Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop
Slowboater is my personal music project. Much of the songwriting borrows from sounds and feels of the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s, so the imagery and typography is heavily weathered and distorted to feel as if you uncovered something in your parent’s attic. Building the identity from scratch by myself has been an enjoyable challenge. Much of the merchandise is built around the EP: Petty Or Not, Here I Come. I plan to have merchandise that will be tied to each release.
Singles: These Days and Old-Fashioned received their own cover art for streaming. The EP’s artwork includes personal photographs that have been heavily edited to match the vintage identity. Text has been weathered and made to appear as though it is fading from the paper. I mocked up a full 7 inch vinyl sleeve to fully realize the concept and provide more imagery for merchandise. The t-shirt designs feature the “window” motif from the back of the sleeve in multiple iterations.
Petty Or Not, Here I Come EP Cover
The front cover features a photograph taken on the way to Duluth, MN near the Black Bear exit. The photo and text have been edited to age them. I began by creating two copies of the image and filtering them so only the blue would show in the top and the red in the bottom. I then blended them together slightly off center to create the uneven diffusion of color.
EP Back Panel
The back features a triptych of photos of Moose Lake taken from a moving vehicle that have been edited in the same way as the front cover. If you look at the label on the vinyl itself, you can see the two image layers in isolation used to create the cover as the A and B side.
Single Cover Art | Merchandise | Advertising
The two singles for the EP receive their own cover art for streaming. Musically, These Days uses chord progressions and imagery common in 2000’s emo/punk songs. The cover art (left) employs many of the motifs and editing tricks of that era: typewriter typefaces, trees losing their leaves, heavy color saturation, and lots of texture.
Old-Fashioned (right), however, is more similar sonically to 80’s alternative. My favorite design choice of that time was high contrast half-tones. I added a purple tinge to mimic how those colors break down over time and added a similar level of texture.
Above: a sample of the advertising for the EP on streaming. The banner ad will also be used as the header for the merch page on the website. It uses the same image as the cover, but the effect is more exaggerated.
Left: the primary shirt design for the release. It features the window motif from the back panel of the physical release. The t-shirts are made using direct-to-garment printing (which is a type of ink-jet printing) on 100% cotton t-shirts. This yields a clean result, but is not as resilient to wash and wear as screen printing.