BREAKING BENJAMIN

I’ll say this much right at the beginning: It is extremely rare that designers/art directors get to work with an artist on six studio albums in a row. As a side note: We have always been big fans of the album art by the band Chicago because they managed to incorporate their iconic logo in a smart fashion within the cover art. As we began work on the first title ‘Saturate,’ we created a simple but effective typography style for the cover, hoping that if we would get hired again for their sophomore album, we would continue with this direction. At the same time, we thought that maybe we could be similarly clever as Chicago, and ‘hide’ the band’s Celtic knot logomark within the art. Thanks to the team at Hollywood Records and the band’s manager Larry Mazer, we were given carte blanche to come up with cover concepts. While there were a handful of interesting visuals that we were pursuing initially, none of them represented their sound and intensity. A good friend was visiting us in L.A. at the time on a business trip, and one evening during dinner, he asked what projects we were working on. Toby mentioned this very project, but that we just hadn’t found the right visuals yet. Our friend, a cardiologist, told us that he happens to have a CD-R with high-resolution images of infected human blood cells and that we were free to use any of it. This was it! Perfect. The cover and the packaging came together rather quickly thereafter.

Five more albums were to come our way, a dream come true, to pursue the concept explained earlier. Each cover tells a part of Ben’s life story, even if at times in a more abstract manner. Will there be an album number seven?