Here's what I ended up going with for the album:

The front artwork is at the top of this post, and this fine piece here is the back artwork. Although I made this one for an anniversary, I didn't think it would be all that smart to overly highlight the number of years. One just just imagine a triplicate of that number, and the message that might convey. So, without really being able to play with that theme, I looked elsewhere. - Veerle Pieters wrote yet another very insightful piece on her blog from which I found I could easily take some inspiration. I avoided using Illustrator, mainly because I'm not very familiar with it, and I was under a bit of a time crunch to get this done. I've been doing more with Illustrator, but now wasn't a good learning time. As usual, Fireworks to the rescue. - Although none of the *cough*default*cough* typefaces are anything to be proud of, that 6 was drawn by yours truly. I'd be curious to do spend more time drawing characters/glyphs for a typeface. I don't have the eye to make the next Helvetica, but I might have some fun with it. - Kuler gave me my color theme (I wish I had a link to the specific theme, but alas, my brain was elsewhere when I found it). Because I know you're curious, here's a simple strip for your color-picker purposes:

If there's any comfort in this album, it's in my commitment not to wait so long to make the next installment. Admitedly, I listened to a lot of books in the previous year, so I wasn't listening to as much music. Now that I've finished that insanely long series of books, I'm back to listening to music.