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Squeaky Feet — Here's Your Perfect Storm

Album artwork, singles series and vinyl packaging.

Album art · Illustration · Packaging

The Here's Your Perfect Storm cover: an orange lightning bolt strikes marshy ground strewn with blue rocks, drawn in fine hatching on kraft paper under a blue, pink and cyan electrical grid diagram with callout boxes, voltage labels and a Squeaky Feet title block.

Overview

Here's Your Perfect Storm treats a storm as a piece of paperwork. The artwork is staged as a 1985 field survey: a bureaucratic document made by someone whose job was to measure, chart and file a lightning strike. The joke and the feeling are the same thing. You can grid it, label it and give it a revision number, but you can't contain it. The title works the same way: a calm, official handoff of something completely out of control.

Concept

The cover is drawn as Plate 17A, a technical record of a single strike hitting marshy ground. It's laid out on a kraft-paper sheet with an electrical grid diagram over the landscape. Every number on the sheet is meant to hold up if an engineer reads it. The system data uses a real North American distribution spec (13.2 kV line-to-line, 7.62 kV line-to-neutral, 60 Hz three-phase). Ground-potential isolines follow real decay intervals. The strike sits at 39°04'30" N, 104°48'00" W, on Colorado's Palmer Divide, which has the highest cloud-to-ground lightning density in the state. That's a nod to the band's home. The grid reference PG-7A-19.88 became "Palmer Grid" after the fact.

This one is personal. Before design was my full-time work, I spent seven years mapping electrical grid infrastructure. This record let me turn that world of one-line diagrams, survey grids and system specs into something expressive.

Process

03 details

The illustration was drawn by hand in Procreate. All tone comes from line density, with no gradients or airbrush. Storm clouds, rocks and vegetation are built from hatching, stipple and ruled lines, like a steel engraving in an old engineering textbook. Detail drops off with distance. Foreground rocks and the impact zone get full stroke-by-stroke rendering, while the background goes to simple stippled silhouettes. The result reads as atmospheric depth, the way an antique plate engraver would handle it.

The technical layer was drafted to match period conventions. It includes leader lines, callout boxes, dashed construction lines, node markers and a revision block (REV B, dated 06.14.85). The margins hold a hobbyist sferic-receiver schematic, the kind of circuit someone in 1985 might build to detect lightning, with real component symbols and part numbers. The lettering is set in OCR-B to echo Leroy and Rapidograph drafting. It was placed by hand in Illustrator so every label stays crisp and legible.

Detail of the impact zone, where the orange bolt meets marshy ground in a burst of yellow and orange strokes, with blue rock shards thrown outward, rippling water lines and a fallen log. — The impact zone.

Detail of the lower left corner, with the Isoline Intervals and System Data callout boxes beside a schematic of coils, resistors and capacitors drawn along the bottom margin among hatched rocks. — System data and the schematic margin.

Detail of the upper right, with the orange bolt and its branches beside bare trees in fine indigo linework, crossed by the blue grid diagram, a node marker labeled G4C and the Energy Routing legend box. — Trees under the grid diagram.

Palette

05 inks

Five inks on kraft:

Blueprint blue
linework and annotation
#2184B1
Hot magenta-pink
isolines and the energy of the strike
#FA4098
Orange
survey markers and callouts
#FB6E1A
Cyan
the schematic layer
#08A1BF
Deep indigo
illustrative hatching
#222462

The Singles

03 singles

Each single is another plate from the same survey: a different spot around the strike, drawn to match its song.

The Countdown single: an aerial survey map of the strike site on a coordinate grid, with green and pink contour lines, blue tree clusters, a winding turquoise river and dashed rings around the impact point. — **Countdown**A topographic map of the strike zone. Five dashed rings count down from the impact point, spaced about 343 meters apart, the distance sound travels in one second.

The Terms & Conditions single: a barbed-wire fence line standing in floodwater, with a small Terms & Conditions sign hanging from the wire under a faint schematic diagram. — **Terms & Conditions**A flooded fence line with a sign hung on the wire. The barrier to entry, and the fine print after the storm.

The No Fun single: an empty red swing set standing in floodwater in heavy rain, with a yellow lightning bolt striking in the distance. — **No Fun**An empty swing set in the rain. The storm has called off play, but the scene stays bright and colorful.

Vinyl

02 images

The packaging was pressed with Pour House Pressing. It includes a 12" jacket, an 11×11 insert and center labels that carry the isoline rings onto the record itself, with pink for Side A and cyan for Side B.

Mockup of the album jacket standing upright in front of the insert, with the black record sliding out to the right. — Jacket and insert with the record. Mockup.

The back cover, a survey map of the strike site with contour lines, blue trees and a turquoise river, the six-song tracklist in a box at top left and the credits in a box at bottom right. — Back cover.