For a number of years back in the mid noughties, I worked full time as part of a small team running independent record label Tru Thoughts. A handful of us made up the whole operation which meant everyone wearing a lot of different hats but my primary role was that of Production Manager, co-ordinating the mastering, design and manufacturing of our releases. It was a great environment to cut my teeth in commercial graphic design, creating event flyers and artwork for various CD & Vinyl formats.

The gallery above features just a small sample of some favourite graphic design and product packaging projects for Inmo clients, circa 2007-2010.

Managing the manufacturing side of things encouraged me to think in terms of product packaging options as well as the graphics to appear on them, something that was increasingly important at the time as the demand for physical releases was in decline.

As an independent label there was always a lot of pressure to keep our costs down so options were often limited and inventive trade-offs required to balance costs when reaching for different paper stock, special inks and finishes Starting the process with this in mind meant an appropriate strategy could usually be found to avoid the end result feeling like any kind of compromise, which was a good lesson in embracing constraints in order to arrive at interesting results.

When I went on to set up my studio Inmo, Tru Thoughts came with me as my first major client alongside a number of other independent labels to whom I would provide similar assistance with various aspects of graphic design, production co-ordination and general production management.