I’ve always hated working in Quark and view it merely as a necessary evil when going to print. I have been known to throw a cat across the room in frustration when working on a project… I’ve been trying to translate my CD design from Photoshop to Quark and was getting really frustrated yesterday working up the disc art. Anyway to make a long story short, a cool old friend of ours was nice enough to let me check out Adobe’s InDesign and WOW! I love that program! Why have I not used it before? I worked up the disc art in no time and feel much more confident about it than I did my Quark document. The learning curve was really quick and the whole experience was much more intuitive. Hooray for Adobe!

Been meaning to give an update. That very same day I prayed a muse would visit me for the Free & Easy artwork, well, I guess she heard, because I had a breakthrough. Got the cover figured out and Ryan loved it. Also came up with the inside 2 panel concept. I’m just not sure about the back cover now… Sometimes I wish I weren’t such a perfectionist. I think I could get a lot more done if I weren’t so picky.

We’ve pretty much got the master disc together for the new album, but now we’re stuck on the artwork. That was kinda the case with Windblown Kiss, as I recall… Back then, we flew out to San Fran for a whirlwind photography session with Susan Jennings, but this year she has been too busy to hook up, so we’re trying to go it alone. We’ve been crazy mad busy, too, honestly. Even with the last album, I put together the cover only to have Projekt reject (or should I say rejekt) it and had to start over. I was lucky to find a few nature shots alongside the band photos that were pretty cool.

This time around, I think Ryan would like to try something different from his past albums. You know, everything up to now has been an indistinct fuzzy image made up more of color than form, in the tradition of early 4AD and Projekt. Now that we’re on our own, I think we want something more representative of us. I’ve been tossing around various ideas for the cover, but I’m not sure anything has quite stuck yet. Plus it’s been so fricken hot that I just don’t feel creative. Especially not sitting here at my computer in this bright hot room. Yuck. I just pray that some muse appears and rescues me!

The third episode is now up and ready to download from the Lovespirals site! Ryan and I chit chat about our recent Pacific Northwest roadtrip and announce the inclusion of our podcast in the both the iTunes store and Odeo. I’m excited that these two services will make it much easier for fans and friends to subscribe as well as for new folks to discover us. I’m not really sure how many subscribers or listeners we have right now, but I imagine it’ll take a bit of time for everyone to find out we’ve got a podcast and start listening regularly. I was a bit hesitant to check out podcasts at first, but being a fan of Kevin Rose, I started listening to TwiT and now Diggnation, and I’m sort of hooked. I’ve begun wondering what other fun shows are out there that I should check out. If anyone reading this has a favorite, please comment back with a link!

OK I don’t often find points of connection with Billy Corgan, but this quote from a Business Week interview definitely struck a chord with me:

Up until MySpace, my interactions with the Internet were negative. The anonymity can bring out the negative in people who use message boards. People argue, and I’m not the kind of person who’s going to argue it out. But MySpace encourages a personal connection. It makes everyone kind of equal. I don’t have a message board on my own site anymore. I felt like I was creating a forum for people to be negative.

I dunno why people are jerks on messageboards, but they totally are. I don’t really miss our old one too much. Forums seem really 90’s now, anyway. Ha!