Personalized holiday gifts
For holiday gifts for my friends and family in 2019, I decided to make all homemade gifts. Instead of paintings or photos, I got crafty and made everyone personalized mixed CDs and designed the jackets for them. This was a super fun project to work on and made for a really nice personal gift.
It’s always refreshing to work on personal projects, to design things for people who you know really well. I felt like I was able to capture the personalities of the recipients in the CD jacket design. Sourcing the images for the covers was a great time. My dad was a professional skydiver for a few years, so we have a couple skydiving photo books lying around that he’s in and had taken photos for. Those guys look like they had a lot of fun up in the air, I especially loved the image of two skydivers in pope and devil costumes and had to use it somewhere.
One of my favorite running jokes is a commentary on a phrase my friend once exclaimed loudly with no context or prompting whatsoever, “I like trains!”
Good opportunity to use an image from an old contact sheet I never printed. The background is a painting I did a year or so ago, and in the photo is the recipient of the CD and another of our friends, from an art trip.
May look like a volcanic eruption, but it’s just eggs cooking in a tomato-pepper sauce.
This has always been one of my favorite photos. I took it of my friend, Alain, in an alleyway in Pittsburgh behind an art gallery several years ago. I love his expression and hand movements in the photo, it makes the image feel personal, even if you don’t know Alain.
My friend Brooke loves things that are cute and pastel, so I approached her CD cover design with a simple but fun background and bold but personality-filled type.