My Fathers Collection.

A photographic archive of my fathers handwritten record sleeves.

My parents always played music as I was growing up, and they still do. They had a large collection of music on Vinyl, CD and even MiniDiscs (when they were a thing) and now digital. 

I was gifted my parents record collection when they moved. 

As I listened my way randomly through the collection, I noticed that some of the records had some notes on the inner sleeves. 

My father had replace the inner sleeves of his records with blank or generic ones and made some notes on timings and band members and years of release, even some remarks on the record quality and scratches. 

As I listened to more of the records with my own son, I found more of these annotated sleeves. 

Each time I did it felt like I was connecting to the young version of my father and his beloved record collection. 

As I found more and more I felt that I wanted to document them, so the idea of a photo book formed. 

I collected all the records that had the annotated sleeves and started designing. 

 I sketched out what i would like the layouts to look like. I came up with a few different page designs, some with the focus on a single album sleeve, gate-fold sleeves and other layout options. 

Using the layouts as a starting point I made myself a shooting list for which photos I needed to take for the book. 

The cover Design.

Using the hand written names from the sleeves I created a blank cover with just the artists names and put them on the front and back of the cover to make the book feel like a annotated record sleeve.

 

Half the names are on the front and half on the back. 

        

Page Layouts. 

I used the layouts I had designed as a base, because as the as I started working on the pages the layouts needed to evolve to show the sleeves of correctly. 

Each page has a large picture of the sleeve and a smaller image of the actual cover, no stock photos used, all of the pictures are high quality photos of the real items, with all the wear and tear that the years have provided.  The pages also had a notes section that lists some info that I observed about the sleeves, such as notes on scratches, surface noise, years of release, and purchase year and so on.  

On the odd page there are some short reviews from my son. 

I had the book printed using an online company.

It was printed as a 11inch square photo book, the aim was to mimic a vinyl record. 

The result worked very well, I know it is smaller than an actual record but it works really well.