THE FELIX CULPA - Special Edition CD Packaging
Here’s a look at the Special Edition CD packaging for my rock band The Felix Culpa’s album, “Sever Your Roots”. This cover image features these great antique letterpress blocks that I scanned individually and assembled with minimal retouching in Photoshop. This was incredibly fun to put together and turned out exactly how I wanted. Some of us in the band actually wanted this to be the official cover, but with every music site on the internet set up to display only square imagery, it was just easier to use the LP cover. I actually liked the idea of having different covers for the same release.
Now, I know what you’re thinking… “this doesn’t look like a CD package”. You’re right. For this project, I actually had the opportunity to design a special “extended digipak”. The die was designed and constructed specifically for this release. Here’s a look at the specs:
Initially I had wanted to combine photography and ink spatter like illustration for the overall look of this album packaging, but as it progressed I branched out and just combined a lot of random elements.
This was one of the illustrations that came out of those ink spatter sketching sessions, and really the only unifying part to all of this packaging. I ended up using these “roots” all over everything from merch to the actual disc face to the download cards to the LP dust sleeves to tie it all together:
Since this was to be the “special edition” packaging, the initial plan was to have a full booklet. I didn’t want to just typeset the lyrics, so I actually asked my band mates to each pick their favorite couple of songs and hand write them using whatever medium they wanted. One of them was even done in white out on black gaff tape. Unfortunately time and budget constraints left us without the ability to do the full booklet, but I utilized a few of the lyric pieces for the interior of the packaging. Here are some of them complete and unedited. I thought the band did an incredible job on them, and they are all really quite stunning on their own. I wish we would’ve been able to feature them all.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this look into the CD packaging. There are a very, very few copies of this special edition packaging left over at the Culpa merch store if you’re at all interested. Thanks.
-marky