February Dream – ‘Dare’ EP Front Cover
February Dream – ‘Dare’ Inside Sleeve
February Dream – ‘Dare’ Inside Sleeve
February Dream – ‘Dare’ EP Back Cover
February Dream – ‘Dare’ Disc Label
Cloud Typography Detail : February Dream – ‘Dare’ EP Cover
One of the first projects that landed on Honey Rogue’s desk upon jumping back into the work saddle for 2013, was a delightful little brief from Gemma and Christa, who together form the acoustic duo ‘February Dream’. February Dream create songs for two voices, full of eloquence, simplicity and grace. Musically, their original compositions recall the great acoustic heroes of another era – Simon & Garfunkel… The Byrds… The Lovin’ Spoonful… The Mamas & The Papas. More recently they could be said to be cut from the same cloth as The Corrs, Indigo Girls and The Waifs.
Their name comes from staring up at the sky on a sunny February day, whilst listening to their favourite music – an action similar to the way their own songs are intended to be heard – simple, powerful and moving – the very essence of music. We received their wonderful creative brief which requested the album artwork reflect “…the song “February Sky” which is a song about seeking inspiration from a beautiful clear blue sky with a hint of white, wispy, streaky clouds. A song about seeing our dreams of music written in the sky”
So we set about re-creating that classic Aussie summer sky digitally and also created the EP title ‘Dare’ in a typography of clouds. To do this we loaded up a range of stock photos of various clouds into Photoshop, as custom brushes, and then hand-crafted the cloud shapes and objects over the top of a base type stencil. Once the stencil was removed the clouds sat in the sky as if some freak wind had arranged them into one giant word in the sky.
This cover captured the brief to create something “happy, warm, carefree, feel good, relaxed and inspirational.” Once we’d created the cover we then worked closely with Gemma and Christa on creating additional elements. We extended the sky for application on several other panels in the gatefold packaging, including dandelions as a further metaphor for ‘dreaming’ or ‘wishing’ something into existence.
For the inside sleeve we were quite taken with the lyric sheets and busking license documents that the duo had provided us for initial inspiration. February Dream started out busking, using two milk crates as seats and an open guitar case, so we wanted to include this sense of history in the artwork. We took the scans of lyric sheets and band documents and put them all together in a new ‘scrapbook’ page feel.
Once the artwork package was approved we also took these elements further by creating a suite of unique graphics to use on social media platforms, with EP imagery provided for use on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, You Tube and the band’s own website.
The outcome:
“We love your email – the February Dream is contagious isn’t it?! Your artwork brought smiles to our faces and feels exactly right 
“
“Really love the concept of the dandelions! – we went through an old music ideas book earlier tonight and found that we had drawn a dandelion with the word wish above it years ago! Spooky eh?”
“Thanks again, we are stoked at how perfect every element of the artwork is! You are spot on “
