Northlane - Discoveries - Limited Edition Vinyl (Album, 2012, UNFD)

July 13 2021: Hysteria Magazine feature - How Each Northlane Release Influenced the Oz Music Community

Click here for the breakdown of the original Discoveries artwork in 2011.

After the success of the record release in late 2011, and with vinyl on the surge again in a big way, we reconvened to discuss a limited edition vinyl version of the record. Feeling like the scale of a 12” record jacket wouldn’t necessarily suit the original artwork simply being printed larger, I wanted to retain everything that I felt was important about the original, but strip it right back and make it more flexible for use on all sorts of mediums. The same sequence concept of the cube being opened to reveal its construction needed to remain through the process of opening and seeing each surface of the packaging.

The main challenge with reproducing the artwork with the paper cube was in photographing it in exactly the same proportions, angle, and depth of field as the original, minus the hands. I wanted it to be essentially an identical piece, but with everything taken away. Because of the way my hands were blocking big parts of it in the original version, it couldn’t have been a simple Photoshop task. Instead, it was set up again on a white backdrop, and carefully blutacked to the vertical background, and after much squinting and rubbing my temples while having my laptop next to it as a reference, we ended up with a clean, usable hands-free version of the cube to work with.

The rest of the layout design took its cues from the internal booklet design from the original, but reimagined in a more minimal, clean way that really tried to champion the physical size of the jacket and use the scale to give everything breathing room.

And one of the most exciting things to come from this was the limited edition skateboard deck that was then able to be produced thanks to the freefloating nature of the new cover art.

Shot on Canon 50D with the 50mm 1.8. Edited in Lightroom 3, compiled and designed in Photoshop.

Rear jacket, insert layout, mockups of the two colour variations /150, and the skateboard design limited to /50.