We just completed the book design for author Hallie Baur’s second historic fiction book titled Remastered. The client was Culicidae Press, and the book will be released on 31 January 2023. 

In the book a record store plays an important role, as does time travel between different decades of the twentieth century, so the author suggested a stack of old vinyl records in their sleeves. Visiting several antique stores we came across a suitable stack, and after some manipulation in Photoshop (adding a blank vinyl record on top of the stack, blurring the album sleeve text to anonymize the band/singers) and going through several iterations of fonts preferred by the author, we landed on the image above. Below are early, but rejected versions of the cover design, including a few that were sketched on an iPad.

The designer’s favorite one is the third one in the top row which shows decades as numbers overlayed on the record stack. An early sketch (last drawing in the gallery) shows the idea of time travel across layers of time. The final version is more subtle.

Client: Culicidae Press