Grumble

[mdlbear]

Well, I think I have a pretty good idea now of what I want in the way of graphics for the album. What I don't have is any way of getting from vague ideas to something Oasis can actually, like, print. I have absolutely no talent for graphic design, and no experience with the tools I'd need. Spent about an hour playing with The Gimp and Inkscape (comparable in capability and complexity to Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively) and discovered that it would probably take me several days to get to the point where I could even do an approximation of what I want.

I may have one or two coworkers I can turn to. Not clear; it's a very busy couple of weeks at work. I will probably end up throwing more money at Oasis -- their rates are actually pretty reasonable.

Meanwhile, I think the main thing I have to do to the tracks is cleanup. Audacity doesn't seem to have a way to leave a track in the project but not in the mix -- you can mute them on playback, but they still get added in when you export. Reducing the volume sort of works, but they're still in there adding to the noise floor, and although I suppose you could expand the scale to the point where you really could reduce them down to zero, it'll be simpler to just copy the projects and delete the tracks I don't want. Not rocket science -- I think I can do it pretty quickly, then re-tweak the mixes if necessary.

Next week sometime? It's not totally impossible, if I can just keep focussed on -- Oooh! Shiny!

Comments

[tiggerypum.livejournal.com]

I do graphics for a living. If you have some specs from them and want to come visit and sit on a chair next to me for a couple hours, I bet we can create something.

[artbeco.livejournal.com]

I've done design and layout on a couple of albums before, if you want to hire locally. ;) It tends to be very nitpicky work, but Oasis is quite nice to pick nits with, as such things go. If you'd like to drop specs and text and your design ideas in my lap, I could pull it together for you. Probably wouldn't get finished by next week, but probably soon thereafter...

[mdlbear]

Tempting. It's not as if you don't have copies of the photographs...

I'll see what I can pull together over the next couple of days.

[mdlbear]

OK, let's do it!

You'll find the ideas that I've been writing up over the last few days here. I think what we should do is sit down and brainstorm together after you've had a chance to look at it; that way if you need design elements from my desktop, or quick text edits, I can cook them up on the spot.

I'm available all this weekend and next weekend; my daytime schedule during the week is likely to be busy because we're doing dry runs of various presentations.