When beloved music professor Lance Strickland announced his retirement in 2000 from St. Louis Park High School in Minnesota, several students collaborated and came to one agreement: this event could not be allowed to go unappreciated. SLP alumni Darin Goulet and Andrew Thomas (both '93) contacted a generous handful of fellow musicians who had also passed under Lance's tutelage, and organized a concert to be held at the high school, conducted by Lance, and performed by the students. In addition, Thomas arranged to create a CD containing the original music of several students who had gone on to achieve success on their own. This CD is the end result.

When Thomas commissioned me to design the album cover, there existed only a few parameters to follow: since the school's colors are orange and black, the cover would have to conform to them. Also, since music was obviously the focus of the project, the cover should probably contain images of some musical instruments. To show faces of students would require photos which I did not have, and it would show favoritism and possibly date the project, which was not our objective.

I opted for the brick background, visible only through the haze surrounding the "P" behind the title bars. For the wood-grain-like texture behind the titles, I used an image of water, threw it in reverse, and reapplied the color until it turned orange. I formatted the text in Cornerstone, and pushed it right to the edges of the orange bars. On the bottom, I used Modern No. 20, and kept it in all lower-case type.

Since I was 600 miles away from my alma mater, I had to use whatever resources were at hand in my immediate possession. I found a few photographs on St. Louis Park's web site, which were sufficient to serve as back cover and inside graphics.

For more information on the CD, please follow this link to the MP3.com website, where you can hear audio samples from several of the artists featured therein.