Technical Post - Designing the HOTW Vinyl

Hi everyone! It's adi! Today I wanted to show some of the progress shots and the thoughts that went behind the Heart of the Woods LP.

Soon after the Highway Blossoms vinyl went live, the support you all showed us let us discuss the possibility of a new project: the Heart of the Woods LP! This one would be bigger in pretty much every regard; first off, we would need two discs for the whole OST, and a gatefold to hold them, which meant 2 extra surfaces to cover in a design. Scott (of Very Ok Vinyl) also wanted to do a spot gloss effect on the cover.

I was honored to be the cover artist again this time! For Highway Blossoms, as SmokeThief's songs were separated out into a vinyl, we decided to call that collection of songs 'Dusk', as I thought that would be appropriate for the overall tone of those songs. To illustrate this, and to put less of a focus on the art style of the characters (as I'm not one of the original HB artists), I went for a large scenery shot to convey the mood and the feeling.

I love collecting things and I love when things match. So I decided to make the HOTW ones match too - focus on scenery and atmosphere, and the characters existing within it. Since the two OST names were already decided - Snowfall + Moonlight, I asked if we could do a dual cover - both sides are the 'front' for each of the discs, and I wanted both covers to get a highlight! We don't have a lot of official Tara/Morgan art, so I wanted to put one in.

The concept for Maddie/Abby came pretty easily to me - obviously, the moon is a major theme in HOTW, especially at the fairy lake. Originally I thought of doing the first kisses as scenes, but I decided to do something a little more new. I wanted them in their own world, facing the moonlight at the lake.

Tara/Morgan was a lot harder! My initial thought was to make the camera outside a window looking into Morgan's room for that first kiss scene, as mentioned, but it felt a bit too voyeuristic? lol. So after some thinking I wanted them directly in the snow! I had a few more romantic concepts and a few more fun concepts, but after a lot of consideration I decided that I wanted them being bright and happy in the snow (and Morgan showing off her Muscles.) Tara lifts Morgan out of her darkness and I wanted to highlight that aspect of their relationship.

This way, the cover fit the concepts and it made it easy to decide where the spot gloss should be - the snow/moon + any text!

I was polishing the Moonlight cover while concepting the Snowfall one.

I also volunteered to do the exclusive sticker design! I have such a blast working with VOV, they're extremely receptive to all my extra ideas, and I wanted some brand new art for an exclusive sticker. Honestly, it didn't even take that much thinking - Tara with an OK hand! This got approved and completed quickly.

Josh is the big vinyl collector - I only have the ones with my art on them! So he knew from the get go that he wanted the Coke Bottle Clear colour for the LPs. I had no reason to object. I started thinking about the label design though, as a result - wouldn't it be cool if the colours matched the disc!

I wanted a more graphic label, at least on one side - maybe a snowflake for Snowfall, a moon for Moonlight, and the information on the back.

Scott suggested doing an inverse colour for one of the labels, and while I really liked how it looked, it didn't look great on the disc mock...

...So I asked if we could alternate the discs as well - one clear, one coke bottle clear. When that got approved, we landed on our final disc colours and labels!

Of course, in tandem with all that, we were designing the inside pages. Originally I wanted to fit the key visuals on the inside pages, but in the end I really just loved the cleaner look of what we ended up with.

But we wanted to include the key visuals somewhere... but also the Torgan kiss, to have a bit more Torgan representation... We struggled with this for a while - the inserts would cost quite a bit to produce - even more if it's double-sided, and even more if it's two! We almost cut one of them out, but we just barely made it work. Seeing people frame the inserts or hang them up really makes it worth it though!

I wasn't sure where to fit this in, but a random sort of inside knowledge - to do spot gloss/foil stamping effects, we need to prepare vector files for where that needs to go. There's a very different ways to do this, but generally text/fonts are made up of vectors in the first place so it's not too difficult to convert those in a program like illustrator/photoshop/affinity. For image elements, I tend to use illustrator's live trace option or png to svg conversion websites - the image below is the result of one of those.

And that is the story of how we made designed the Heart of the Woods vinyls! I know it's a little bit rambly, but I hope you enjoyed it all the same! It's been incredibly rewarding to see the results of our hard work come to life, and I'm always so, so grateful to all the people interested in our work to pick up these great, dream-like merch items.

Thanks for reading until the end! You can still pick up a copy on the Very OK Vinyl webstore or the Studio Elan webstore!! I love every single photo people post of the vinyls, so if you've recently received yours please feel free to show us!

- adi

P.S. I've made wallpapers out of the covers!