Star Trek: The Motion Picture

CD design La-La Land Records soundtrack jerry goldsmith Star Trek Paramount Pictures

3-CD Soundtrack Album

La-La Land Records, 2012

When La-La Land Records and producer Mike Matessino asked me to design a planned 3-disc album of Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant, Academy Award-nominated score for 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, most of the scores in the Star Trek franchise had already seen lavish remastered and expanded album releases. Although released by three different labels--Film Score Monthly, Intrada and La-La Land Records, each featured design and art direction that was of a deliberately consistent style.

However, I felt strongly that this new release for The Motion Picture needn't fall so neatly in line with the other re-releases, partly because the 1979 original likewise stood apart from the more deliberate consistency of style and costuming found in all of the ensuing Trek sequels. Keeping that in mind, I looked at the film's original marketing and merchandise for inspiration. Turns out in 1979, the then-new Trek brand was handled with a looser consistency than you'd see with today's marketing campaigns. Of special note were the many logo treatments, fonts and color choices used throughout the materials (see below for examples).

Shown here are some of the vintage books and tie-in merchandise that helped to shape the new soundtrack's design and overall direction.

There was however one striking element at the center of the film's iconic keyart: the vertical column of light holding the shimmering faces of Kirk, Spock and Lt. Ilia within the colors of the optical spectrum.

Painted by the great commercial artist Bob Peak (who also painted the teaser poster for Superman: The Movie the year prior for which I also ended up design a soundtrack, detailed here) , the poster suggests the transporter effect central to the Trek mythos and at the heart of the well-known "Beam me up, Scotty" misquotation. That prism of light may not have carried over to the merchandising of the film, but to me it was a strong visual motif that could anchor the design of the CD set, so that any soundtrack collector, at a glance, could spot it on their shelves.

The scan of the Bob Peak artwork sent by Paramount (above) was in very good shape, but did not include the title treatment, as that element was either produced separately by Peak himself, or by the studio marketing team. Whichever the case, the best element I could source of that familiar logotype was a so-so scan of one of the theatrical posters. In order to give myself as much flexibility in the layout and sizing of the title as possible, I needed to recreate the logo, redrawing it first in Adobe Illustrator, then adding the rainbow of color shading to the thick outline in Photoshop.

There was a little bit of grain and flecks added to simulate the look of the original element, which was almost certainly airbrushed.

In addition to using the keyart on the package cover and inside booklet, the rainbow effect was played prominently across the twin spines of the jewel box and used to more subtle effect within the accompanying booklet.

As shown in the above track listing, each of the three discs in the set were color-coded, according to the three faces shown in the Peak poster art. This same three colors would be reflected on the discs, with retouched images of Kirk, Spock and Ilia depicted inside the Starfleet delta.

Parts of each disc were intentionally left unprinted to allow the silvery surface to shine through. The design for the discs was based on the familiar circular shape of the saucer section of the refit Enterprise, seen in the 1979 blueprint scanned below.

Moving along to the interior of the booklet, the only hiccup was the quality of the stills, which had a dark grainy quality not uncommon to scans taken from 35mm slides and likely scanned early on in the digital era. Some brightening, dust removal and color-clarity and sharpening was needed throughout.