For my next Urinine Records project, a tribute to Bob Seger called Sweet 16's Turned 31, the label gave me complete freedom to explore whatever direction I wanted—and I took them up on it.

The title comes from Seger's "Rock and Roll Never Forgets," a song about returning to the music you loved when you were 16, even as you get older. But I found something darker in the phrase. Sixteen is a time when everything seems possible. By 31, you've lived long enough to realize that things don't always turn out the way you'd hoped. I wanted the artwork to reflect that transformation, with images and typography in various states of degradation.

Much of my work up to that point had been pretty buttoned up. I'd wanted to be an architect up until high school, and I've tended to approach design with lots of structure and calculation. This time, though, I made a conscious decision to go off-road without a map or seatbelt.

That meant experimenting with the scanner, deliberately doing things I wasn't supposed to do. Leaving the lid open while scanning newsprint produced a rough edge and an unexpected band of dark blue-green that I decided to keep. Dragging paper across the scanner bed created distressed lines, and an uncropped scan of a Joycam photograph, with the scanner's internal mechanism plainly visible, worked better than what I'd originally intended. Photographs I'd taken with an old 128 film camera while living in Oakland found their way into the package, too. I was layering images, distorting type, and leaving myself open to possibility.

I never went quite this far afield with another CD package. But I didn't entirely retreat to the rigidity of my earliest projects, either. This one opened the door to a much freer way of working, and I found it liberating.