More work on the album, over the past few days. I began by listening to the whole album so far in the dark with headphones, to listen to everything in order with a fresh perspective. This helped a lot. I made a comments list of possible improvements to every track. Nothing is perfect, so every possibility needs looking over, but in the end I didn't change much. The biggest change was a new, more powerful vocal for Looking for a Lover.
For the cover, I came down to three choices. I'm realising that I'm taking longer and longer at every creative act, all due to higher standards. In the past, a first choice will do, but now I work on a second, a third, explore many more possibilities in search of what I think is the best. Of course, this can continue for ever, so a time limit or second factor comes into play, and normally this is an unexpected leap that creates a sense of pleasant change, like a quantum leap. Leaving things for some time to look at work afresh helps too.
Each cover evolves from the former. I'm not completely sure but the second and third are both good enough for me; the second being more busy and unusual, yet I don't like green so much, the third being somehow more typical of an album cover. There is something magical about the third, I can imagine it clearly as a vinyl album sleeve.
Now for the inner pages. Lyrics need an embedded font, not a mere image. An image at 300dpi still creates jagged fonts, but I don't have software which will embed fonts in a CMYK PDF file (OpenOffice is generally better than Acrobat for making PDF files anyway, but OO won't save in CMYK format. I have Acrobat but, in a move typical of Adobe, my version doesn't support CMYK saving and is hugely overpriced for very little utility). Most lyrics in booklets are plain black on white or plain white on black, so perhaps big record companies have similar file format issues with CD replicators. I'm not even sure if replicator companies can even combine bitmap imagery with vector fonts. In my case, I can either use large enough fonts so that issue isn't important, as in Music of Poetic Objects, or not include lyrics.
My goal is to create a total artwork; image, music, poetry, character, narrative. Lyrics must be rendered or not as part of this whole.
