Handmade limited edition album covers
We have spent the past several years refining and perfecting our high-quality heavy-duty laser-cut hand-assembled album packaging. We believe that in this day and age of ever-increasing digital ownership of music, or non-ownership of music, the people who care enough about a band or an album to actually own a piece of their musical history should be rewarded for their passion and purchase with a truly engaging, transcendent listening experience. Half of that battle is up to the band - make the album incredible. The other half, though, which is even more obviously bifurcated in the digital age, is the physical embodiment of that album, the packaging in which the musical information is stored.
Our goal with our packaging is to create a physical manifestation of the music within it. Which is just a fancy way of saying that we want to put as much contemplative thought and reiteration into the packaging of music as the musicians put into the music itself.
Design
Our CD cases are laser-cut, screen printed, and hand-assembled, and if you have access to a laser cutter, you can laser-cut, and screen print or hand-paint, and hand-assemble yourself. Laser cutters are expensive, but there are various maker spaces across the country in most major cities.
We offer our album design for free, open-source, similarly to how we found it. The design is informed by experiments with duct tape, and fabric, and then wood and glue, and in search of a perfect hinge, we took a design from a very cool open source laser cutting design warehouse called Obrary and applied it to our purposes.
The PDF below has up-to-date designs, but we are continuously refining the designs so check back for updates.
Click Here to download the PDF from google drive
Consider supporting the Patreon for our album cover's designer if you end up using our designs in one of your releases. He still hasn't set it up yet but consider it still.
We unfortunately don't do commissions at this time, but our albums, which have been specifically designed to be easily screen-printable by anyone who prints T-shirts, are available wholesale, hand-assembled and ready to be printed and finished, for $10 each. Contact us at ursapolarisrecords@gmail.com or at (760)331-9033.
editor's rant - from wikipedia: "When pressure is applied to the CD jewel case, the case will break first before the CD." That's the worst rationalization for crappy product design I've heard. What's the point of having packaging that will break before the CD does? This defeats the entire purpose of protective packaging: to have a more robust structural integrity than the thing it contains, so that it will protect the thing inside more than if it had no packaging. Instead it's just an excuse for the industry to offer consumers the cheapest product they can get away with, while bleeding the musicians whose music it contains for all of their profits.
packaging is the secret to selling albums
The top selling musical act of all time is The Beatles, whose 21 or so #1 hits helped propel them to international stardom. The quintessential pop star story. But only a few spots south of top-selling artist, there's an aberration in this quintessential story: Led Zeppelin. They're the sixth best selling musical act of all time. And yet, they only had one hit: Whole Lotta Love. Up next, at #7, Pink Floyd sits proudly with only one hit: Another Brick in the Wall (pt.2). And yet while in the #9 spot, Mariah Carey has 18 #1 hits. AC/DC, in the #11 spot, has had ZERO number one hits. And yet they have still sold more albums than Whitney Houston, with 12.
Again and again, the artists who have sold the most albums of all time are, perhaps unsurprisingly, artists who embraced the album as an entire art form, and provided their listeners with the best possible product from top to bottom. Creating a rich and immersive experience starts from the very moment the listener interacts with the packaging. And unlike an iPhone's box, music packaging is used every time the person wants to listen. It's silly not to use that precious time to further engage.
