A retirement ceremony program built as a real printed vinyl record — jacket and two die-cut labels, adapted to a manufacturer's dieline under a strict no-redesign mandate.
Front and back of the finished jacket. The ceremony program is structured as an album set list; the honoree's career is the track listing.
A retiring officer wanted her ceremony program to be something other than a folded sheet of paper. So the program became a record: a printed 7-inch vinyl jacket, with her Air Force and Coast Guard assignments pressed onto the labels as track listings.
The concept and artwork were already designed and approved. My job was the part that decides whether a good idea survives contact with a manufacturer — adapting approved art to the supplied dieline, resolving every bleed, fold, and safe-area requirement, and delivering files that print correctly the first time against a hard ceremony date.
Scope note, stated plainly: the source artwork was supplied by the client and was generated with AI before I was engaged. My engagement was explicitly production layout, print preparation, and template adaptation — not creative redesign. The illustration work elsewhere in this portfolio is drawn by hand; this project is a prepress case study, and it's presented as one.
The brief was unusually strict, and correctly so. The client had chosen her typography, colors, wording, and composition deliberately. The instruction was: do not rewrite text, do not substitute fonts, do not replace graphics, do not change colors, do not redesign the composition.
What was permitted is exactly the vocabulary of production work — proportional scaling, extending background into bleed, cropping non-critical background, optical centering, alignment and kerning refinement, repositioning to hold safe margins, and reconstructing background artwork beyond the trim where the original simply didn't extend far enough.
That gap is the whole job. Artwork designed without a dieline in mind almost never reaches the bleed edge, and its critical elements almost never sit where the safe area wants them. Closing that gap without the client being able to see that anything moved is the craft.
— from the client's statement of work
The jacket is a side-load 7.25-inch sleeve printed on 15pt board. Front and back live on one flat spread that gets folded and glued into a pocket, which means the file has to carry the dieline, the bleed limit, the fold, the glue flap, and the load orientation all at once — and the artwork has to survive every one of them.
Before anything went to the manufacturer I marked my own file and sent it back to the client as an annotated proof. Every circle is a decision that needed a human answer rather than a designer's assumption — and on a job with a fixed ceremony date and no time for a second print run, the annotated proof is the cheapest insurance available.
Why mark your own work: a client who is new to print — as this one described herself — cannot be expected to know which questions matter. Handing over a clean proof invites “looks great,” and “looks great” is how errors reach the press. Handing over a marked proof turns a vague approval into a set of specific, answerable questions.
The two 4-inch circular labels carry the two halves of a career — Air Force as the demo tracks, Coast Guard as the greatest hits, each assignment a track with a duration standing in for time in service. They share a structure and diverge only in palette, so the pair reads as an A-side and a B-side rather than two unrelated stickers.
Circular labels have their own failure modes: type has to clear the spindle hole at the centre, spacing around the outer ring has to stay even, and nothing can clip at the outer trim once the die lands with its normal tolerance. Optical centring matters more than geometric centring here, because the ring of colour is what the eye actually reads as centred.
The jacket and labels shown as the finished retirement album package.
First draft inside twelve hours of award, final package ahead of the deadline, and a physical program that the honoree's family and colleagues kept. The delivery included layered source files, print-ready PDFs, high-resolution raster exports, and packaged fonts and linked assets, so the manufacturer had everything without a follow-up request.
— Emily Brockway · 5.0 ★ Upwork engagement
Why this matters for hire: most print jobs arrive as approved artwork that was never built for a press. The value isn't in redesigning it — it's in getting it onto the dieline so faithfully that nobody can tell it wasn't designed there in the first place, and in asking the three questions that keep the job off a second print run.
Dieline adaptation, bleed and safe-area work, and press-ready packaging — with the questions asked before the file ships, not after.
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