My pastor asked if I would design a cover for a CD that our church is producing. Always up for a challenge, and having been employeed as the layout editor for my high school’s newspaper, I accepted. This was a fun project, but not one without troubles. I have learned much from my mistakes, and look forward to doing more print design in the future.
The first problem I ran into was my lack of software. Never fear, I thought — GIMP to the rescue. I quickly learned that GIMP was not designed for print design, however. The fonts looked awful. I forged ahead nonetheless, though. After consulting with Jason, he managed to salvage my 72 dpi (mistake number two) GIMP produced images into something worthwhile using In Design CS3.
When I looked at what Jason had wonderfully created for me, though, I just wasn’t satisfied. The 8 pt font that he placed in the document using In Design looked so much better than the 42 pt font I placed using GIMP. This is when I learned that GIMP must never ever be used for anything other than photo manipulation.
So I decided that I must start from scratch using software that was designed for desktop publishing. A Google search for an open source In Design alternative led me to Scribus. After installing Scribus and the GhostScript library (to assist with PDF creation), I set to work. It took a little bit to learn the software, but once I got rolling, I managed to produce the final design in just a few hours.
So, without further ado:
The album cover
The track listing page
The cover uses a wordle which was generated using the entire text of 1st Corinthians. I used Good News Publisher’s RSS feed to get all 16 chapters of the Apostle Paul’s letter from the English Standard Version and shoved it into wordle. After randomly generating a dozen or so arrangements, I figured I would have enough to work with. I like the final arrangement of the cover — it looks a bit like a factory with a smoke stack, but the factory is 1st Corinthians, and the smoke is comprised of the words found most commonly therein.
A Corinthian column that I found on Flickr seemed an appropriate backdrop for the track title page. It was provided by these kind folks via a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
Employer: Self
Skills used/gained: GIMP, Scribus, general desktop publishing knowledge
Time invested: 15 hours
