This is a supplementary post with the continued process and research for this playlist album booklet. See the finished project here.
This was a project I did at home for fun, personal skill development, and out of curiosity. I really do hope physical albums, or some of their features and additional material, make a comeback before too long. The final product was produced in Affinity Publisher and Designer, printed one one sheet each Canson tracing paper and Staples 67lb cover stock, finally trimmed to size and bound with some backstitching. Text is typeset in Noto CJK Sans, Courier New, and Helvetica Neue.
Aside from my printer being clogged and out of alignment in more ways than one, I was surprised at how well it printed on the tracing paper, but not at how easily the ink continues to smudge.
My original concept for this playlist, “Time・Place,” was to have one song for each hour of the day, in which each song had that hour in it’s title, but even after branching out to numbers with plausible deniability, this proved easier said than done. Eventually, I included songs that referenced specific times or places, concretely or abstractly, in their titles.
I did do a little research, looking through the booklets or other material with some albums I had on hand. These were some of my favourites. I especially liked the bar graph in Sakanaction’s DocumentaLy booklet, the black bars fill the negative space from the text on the previous page.
The layout was exactly what I wanted digitally, but because of how I wanted to handle the different paper materials and assemble the final booklet at home, I eventually had to re-arrange the print order by hand.
I thought I was going insane with the computer not arranging the pages how I thought it would, so I did make a paper mock-up, both to plan the project and to make sure I was thinking in the same three dimensions I thought I was. Turns out I was right, I just wasn’t constructing the final “book” the same way the computer assumed I would. I did not, however, decide to stitch the binding on the final mock-up until later—also knowing I would only want to do it once.
I did start with a (very small) thumbnail sketch, just to figure out what the separate pieces would be. My original thought was that the code would pop out somehow or otherwise take the place of a CD in its case.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, all of the photos were taken on my apartment floor. My desk is covered with paper scraps, and the light was good enough down low (though the cat was very interested in what I was doing).
Finally, here is a working code and link again. Let me know if you listen to and enjoy the playlist, or have any suggestions of songs with hours in their title.
Duston Baranow-Watts 