Vintage Album Cover
Subdued colors and wandering baselines
The Brief
Design a vintage jazz album cover using just type
Trim Size
12 × 12 inches (305 × 305 mm)
Learning Points
Using the Color Themes tool
Sizing and formatting type
Tools
InDesign or Illustrator
Fonts Used
Balboa Extra Condensed
Inspiration
The period 1940 to 1960 was the first golden era of popular music. Without the Internet, and not even a functioning music press to speak of — Rolling Stone or the NME were still a long way off — the only way to know whether a record was worth buying was by the style and clarity of its cover design.
Many of the record covers of this period make great use of type, as well as limited color palettes. Designs were notable for their simplicity and directness, with just enough playfulness and innovation to make the record stand out on the shelf. We made one of our own in InDesign. You can too — or, if you prefer, use Illustrator.
Color paletteScreenshot 2020-06-04 at 20.25.08.jpg
Start with a square page with half-inch margins. We sampled the colors of a classic jazz album design by Jim Flora, using the Color Theme tool. We added the colors to the InDesign Swatches panel and then adjusted them by eye. We drew a rectangle at the bleed size of the page, filled it with the pale yellow (C7 M4 Y32 K0), and then locked it so it couldn’t be moved by mistake.
Format the type
With a cover that is all about typography, we felt the need to go large. So that the text occupied as much height as possible, we picked a very condensed typeface. Balboa by Jim Parkinson is a display gothic that is very malleable. Treated one way it can look cool and reserved; treated the way we used it here, it can look playful and vintage.
We chose Justify All Lines alignment to span the full width of the type area. To get the letters as big as possible, we selected the type and increased its size incrementally until it broke the line, then backed up one step. We also reduced the leading significantly using the shortcut Option/Alt+Up Arrow to make the type a cohesive block. The default Auto Leading of 120% of the type size will look awful here, especially because the type is in all caps. We’re into serious negative leading here; we ended up with 334 pt type over 250 pt leading.
Sizing Type with Keyboard Shortcuts
For maximum flexibility when sizing type and shifting baselines, use keyboard shortcuts Cmd+Shift+ > /Ctrl+Shift+ > to increase and decrease the point size and Option/Alt+Shift Up or Down Arrow to adjust the baseline of a selected character up or down. We recommend that you reduce the values in the Size/Leading and Baseline Shift fields of the Units & Increments preferences for finer control.
To give the type a more playful character, we made the baselines of the letters uneven. Although it’s possible to automate this with nested styles and GREP styles, because we were working with such a small amount of type, it was more organic to select the letters individually and shift their vertical position with baseline shift.
Make character styles for each of the three colors and apply these, somewhat randomly, to the letters.
Finishing touches
We finished by adding a texture in the form of a worn record sleeve. We downloaded one from Shutterstock and added it via the CC Libraries panel to a layer above the text. To combine it with the colors beneath, we set its blending mode to Multiply and dialed back the opacity to taste.
