For Hospital Grade’s full-length album Written Axe to Trigger, I wanted the packaging to feel less like a CD and more like an artifact pulled from a forgotten shelf. The finished piece evokes a worn, cloth-bound volume whose history is suggested through frayed bindings, faded inks, handwritten marks, and layers of accumulated wear.

Looking back, I suspect Radiohead’s Amnesiac—particularly its limited-edition cloth-bound "library book" packaging released three years earlier—may have lingered somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t remember referencing it directly during the design process, but that package has stayed with me for decades, so it’s easy to imagine its influence quietly finding its way into this work. Rather than borrowing its aesthetic, I found myself pursuing the same larger idea: making a contemporary CD feel like a discovered object with a history of its own.

The foundation came from scans of an old cloth-bound book—including its covers and exposed pastedown where the binding had begun to separate. A stock illustration of a dragon became the dominant visual motif, while found objects collected during walks through Kansas City’s Historic Northeast—including scraps of paper, handwritten notes, and weathered ephemera—were layered throughout the package to suggest years of use and countless unknown owners. Together they transformed contemporary packaging into something that felt discovered rather than manufactured.

The interior continued the illusion. Opening the booklet reveals the exposed spine of the “book,” with typography printed directly onto aged paper rather than conventional CD layouts. Every element was intended to reinforce the fiction that the listener was opening an object with a past, not simply a new release.