The Fathom Street sleeve, start to finish

What is below is every version she kept, in order, and the finished sleeve is not the last of them.

Wren has been asked before why she keeps the discards and has never given a better answer than the one she gave us, which is that the decisions are only visible in the versions nobody chose.

The photograph was taken in February, on a night the band were not being photographed. It is a wet road surface under a sodium lamp, shot at 1/15th of a second from a moving car, and it exists because the photographer was bored at a set of lights.

Nobody thought it was the sleeve for four months.

What made it the sleeve was the record getting quieter. The fourth Hollow Parade album is the one where they stopped adding, and every sleeve idea that had been developed for it was an idea for a busier record — layered, typographic, two or three things happening. When the band delivered the final sequence in May the designer went back through the reject folder looking for something with one thing in it.

The eleven weeks were not about the crop. The crop was settled in an afternoon. The eleven weeks were about density — how dark the image could go before it stopped being a road and became a rectangle, and whether stopping being a road was a problem.

Six proofs went to the band. Four were rejected for being too dark, which the designer maintains is because they were being viewed on screens and not on paper, and which the band maintain is because they were too dark. Both are correct. A sleeve is looked at in a rack in a shop under a strip light, and a proof is looked at on a laptop at midnight, and the same file is two different images in those two situations.

The version that shipped is the fourth-darkest of the six.

There was a version that was better and unusable. It is the one everybody in the room preferred and it disappears entirely at arm's length under a shop light, which is where a sleeve actually has to work.