Packaging for the Milk and Honey Band’s “Dog Eared Moonlight”
Back in 2009, for music fans like myself, MySpace was everything.
I realize that’s a hard sentence to take in these days, what with the rise of the almighty Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but MySpace was at the forefront of the first, big wave of direct, social media connection between fans and artists.
In retrospect, MySpace looked terrible, and had a truly baffling css structure to the page that you could technically “edit”, but it was probably the first, mass-market site to provide easy music streaming on an artists’ page (long before Soundcloud). Thanks to MySpace, I discovered a lot of great bands—one of them being the Milk and Honey Band.
The band was the brainchild of English musician and producer Robert White, and the really cool thing (to me at least) was that they were signed to Andy Partridge’s Ape House label (yes, the Andy Partridge of XTC fame).
The album cover art
After some online conversations with Robert via MySpace, I learned that he was looking for someone to design the cover and packaging for his new album, “Dog Eared Moonlight”—and that’s where I came in.
We emailed concepts back and forth until we settled on the paperback theme (with apologies to a certain publishing house for the inspiration…). The job ended up being a lot of fun, with lots of detailed Photoshop work, aging the text and getting just the right level of well-loved grunge into everything. I carried the theme across all of the packaging elements, working closely with Robert and the label. I particularly liked the library check-out card on the inner wallet, with the handwritten song names and running times in place of a due date.
Detail of the inside cover, CD wallet and disc, continuing the paperback theme.
Another view of the packaging, featuring the reverse of the CD wallet