Pushing something you’ve created out to sea is bitter sweet. Thats why I like websites, you can always iterate and make improvements.
But I like the finality of an album. It’s a time capsule of all the energy and emotion that goes into a project.
So when I get introspective and say “Wow I have been making beats for 10 years without a face and not in a cool daft punk way” I feel the call, recognize the resistance, and say “Now’s the time.”
Oooooh Ghosts!
Why “Phantom Drum”? Its got a few layers. Phonetically, its three syllables. See Rumble Gums, Honey Dew, Pandahead. The meaning of the words themselves are somewhat broad, mostly its about something you feel deep but isnt quite there. An upbeat in a drum pattern. The absence of something. The whitespace in a design.
Artwork and Branding
Describing music is hard enough, doing it for yourself was one of the biggest blockers for me. For years. When stumped, I reach for typography to get started and get some ideas out. They were…okay.
Eh I’ll worry about typography later. Let’s just skip to colors and SHAPES ooo!
Along the way I rediscovered the halftone effect. This is an artifact of physical printers and how they layer color in dots. There’s a Figma plugin that makes it almost too easy. Add a little noise and it starts to have energy.
Okay, starting to see something here. Focus. Need to ship this thing, cant iterate forever. Let’s get back to typography.
I used my little label maker to print out text I needed, then I scanned it back in. I kept the fonts basic. All caps for the cover display too, not my usual choice but it looked more hefty.
Scanned them back in, cut out the backgrounds, and I get some slightly dusty pixellated text!
Now, we have text, we have design direction, we have old 90’s VHS-inspired colors and shapes, lets make the cover! Here’s a few iterations including some I printed out and scanned back into the computer. Chasing those artifacts.
Final product! Just ship it Chase, don’t get stuck on the possibilities! Save it for the next album!!
Now for the website…
I bought phantomdrum.com and rolled up my sleeves to build a FUN SITE. First I built what became known as the Stacked Cubes. Go a head, drag ‘em around.
To keep the whimsy, there's also a feature to generate and leave reviews from a slot machine style spinner:
And if you hit share, you get a link that that has the proper meta image and description:
