CD cover art

Music To The Eyes

Senior Member
Hope I'm posting this in the right section...

Anyway, I'm thinking of offering my services as a cover art designer for small and unsigned bands. I do a lot of music photography, so I'm friends with a few bands that might be interested.

Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? I have no idea how much to charge etc. I'm also a bit clueless with bleeds and setting things up for print, which I'm guessing would be quite important here.

Anyway, general advice would be appreciated! Thank you :)
 
We have worked with a few unsigned bands as well as some signed ones and even some from down under!

Drop me a PM and I will run through what we did, charged etc

M
 
A few years back I worked for a company that produced artwork for CD's.
We also reworked the artwork of old releases, Mott the Hoople, QuantumJump, Fish and others.

All the artwork is regular stuff. Find a temple and work to it.
The tricky bit is the screen printing on actual CD. Make sure you know what make of the CD your client is going to use. Philips, Koch and the like. The difference is the print stacking ring on the disc. Again find a template to talk to the production people.

It's all really straight forward from there...good luck. :D
 
Thanks everyone. Typo - I hadn't even considered printing on the CDs themselves... that scares me.

PMs have been sent - thanks for your help!
 
in my experience unsigned bands and the like don't pay well, so you might have to adjust your prices accordingly... whatever you decide to charge, you can always just get them a quote, if it's too much, say you'll negotiate or ask about their budget...

as far as printing, make sure you measure up an existing cd jewell case inseert and create that in InDesign... as far as bleed, I've always used 3mm, supply the artwork as single paged PDFs with bleed (and crops if specified by the printer)... when printing on a disc, I've found a lot of printers are different, some want cutter guides, some can only print 2 colours... but all, again, require bleed and crops.
 
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