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For her old college a cappella group, The Washington University Amateurs, designer Mary Rosamond created this design for their new CD, “Amalgamation.” The title is apt in both the design, explained below, and even the production where Mary took it upon herself to silkscreen the packaging herself, despite having no experience, showing that you can bring together passion and patience quite successfully. Printed with two colors on Stumptown Press’s pre-cut, foldable-without-glue Arigato Pak, the package has a great earthy quality that highlights the DIY attitude of not just the designer but the group who, in a way, do music by themselves.

The purpose of this project was to help my old college a cappella group by providing them with a design for their new CD. Although we decided on an alternate design for commercial production and public distribution, I wanted to create another design for a “collectors edition” of the CD exclusively for the group members. In a cappella music, the group creates arrangements of popular songs using only their voices. Often, syllables and tones will be specifically chosen to allow the voice to mimic an instrument used in the original recording. Given this unique quality of the a cappella genre, creating a parallelism with imagery of human anatomy and musical instruments (such as a heart and a metronome, vocal chords and a harpsichord, a mouth and a gramophone, etc.) seemed both the most intuitive and intriguing design solution for this project.

Due to the small quantity and in an effort to compliment the visceral quality of the illustrations, I decided to screen print the design onto the CD surfaces and cases myself. Having never screen printed before, it was a challenge learning the technique since there was so much fine detail in the design. Getting used to printing on the different surface textures of the CD and paper case was also a challenge. Completing the project was very rewarding, however next time I’ll have a better idea of the capabilities and limitations of screen printing.

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Tactic Business Card

“Amalgamation” CD

Production Method

Design

Mary Rosamond

Printing

Mary Rosamond with the help of All Along Press