For the first time in a while I decided to print up some labels and cover notes for the latest DJ mix I’ve put together [Summer 2009 by Martin Lucas]. Being a summery house mix I wanted the cover artwork to continue the vibe.

I started off with a sunset photograph from stock.xchng, and proceeded to add layers in Photoshop for the illustrative parts. I also used a flat black coloured layer over the original photograph and set this to a 25% overlay in the layer opacity options – this boosts the contrast and saturation, burning out whites, strengthening colours and darkening blacks. I used non-descriptive curls and swirls to fill in empty areas of the photograph, a banner – again from stock.xchng to use as a place holder for the descriptive text and finally a handful of butterflies and stars in the foreground to bring additional focus to the summer. The image wraps around half of the back of the sleeve, then fades into black to give a background for the tracklist and my contact details.

A few months ago a wrote about having a passive income and choosing to design and hopefully sell some T-Shirts online. Well, the website is finished, and in the collection we have 12 T-Shirts with more hopefully added over the coming weeks and months; www.wormsigntshirts.co.uk.

The website was built in Wordpress, I used the eShop plugin for the ecommerce part of the site – I originally looked at using WP-ecommerce plugin, but it was over complicated for what we actually needed on the site. eShop gives you the option to add a ‘add to basket’ for a product on a page or post – very simple.

The T-Shirts are aimed towards DJ’s and music fans, and will continue along this path for the future. We’ve got a twitter account [twitter.com/wormsigntshirts] so you can follow us for updates, and news, and details of new design releases.

Oh, and how did we get the name Worm Sign? Well, it was after a conversation with a friend who received a strange / maybe alcohol infused text message from a boy stating that ‘we should all look out for the worm signs’. Indeed we should!