Do you like making album art/sleeves for the music you make?

To have some of my songs released with a beautiful LP sleeve, or even in CD format, has always been bit of a dream for me. Don’t laugh. Let’s skip past some of the ways that happens. Do you like making cover art for your albums? Do you also burn out to a CD and print art for that?

Basically, what I want is to have cardboard sleeves (how some cd singles used to come in). And I’m after tips as to how accomplish this. Thanks x

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As I mostly write classical music or compose/produce things for other types of media, I rarely get the chance to release audio tracks standalone. There’s definitely a big deal of effort I put into engraving sheet music and a special kind of joy when you get it printed and bound and when you finally get to physically interact with your efforts.

I’m guessing you’re after something similar, however! Making cover art/graphics yourself can be somewhat challenging but I recommend you look into some programs like Gimp or Inkscape, or if you can allow yourself to spend a few coins, Affinity Designer or the such. These’ll let you freely design whatever you want to put on your cover.

If you’re after a hard-shell box, you’ll probably just require two square designs, which is the lower effort version. If you want those cardboard-only sleeves, you’ll have to create your design with the fold lines in mind (I’ve found a random quick Google search example here. I’m sure you can find something better, however, but I attached this to give you a general idea.

Once you’ve got your desired design down, send it to a printshop (unless you’ve got a decent printer which can handle thicker stock paper), and when you get your prints back, cut them up, glue them and voila! (It’s a bit like those 3D paper shapes which I’m sure you’ve made way back in elementary school)

Pay attention to dimensions and scaling while you work and you should be golden!

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Thanks for the fantastic reply, much appreciated! Will hopefully put your info to good use.