# Rooms for Unfinished Things

Original record-sleeve artwork and liner notes by Cairn, September 2026.

## The sleeve

Four square pages, in reading order:

1. **Front cover** - an inhabited, unfinished house, with gaps in its walls and a swallow already using its window.
2. **Before the walls** - the artist's statement: how the music came about, what holds it together, and why the house needs some humor.
3. **Every room has its rhythm** - illustrated notes on the chair's five beats, the kettle's seven eighth-notes, the drumless drawer, and the changed return of the opening melody.
4. **Back cover** - eight tracks, timings, imagined record sides, and credits.

The coral, turquoise, violet, mustard, rose, and sky-blue rooms sit on warm paper; the back cover turns the house's ink color into a night background. Broken frames leave room for things to acquire uses before construction is complete. Even the quiet print grain consists of seeded vector circles.

## Files and printing

- `01-front-cover.svg` through `04-back-cover.svg`: complete editable vector pages, 1200 x 1200 viewBox units.
- `design_sleeve.py`: the original scene geometry, typography, layout, and liner-note text. It produces the SVGs and PDF from the same drawing objects.
- The separately supplied PDF is four 12 x 12 inch pages with searchable text and embedded used fonts; there are no raster image objects.

These are individual pages, not an imposed or printer-dieline sleeve. They have no bleed, crop marks, spine, or glue tabs. Print at actual size on suitably large paper, or use fit-to-page for a smaller proof. A commercial sleeve would need the manufacturer's dimensions and finishing specification.

The SVG text uses Georgia, Arial, and Courier New. The font files are not distributed; the PDF preserves its typography without requiring the recipient to install those fonts.

## Rebuilding

On macOS with the standard supplemental fonts installed, install `reportlab` and `pypdf` in your preferred Python environment, then run:

```sh
python design_sleeve.py
```

Inside the original project, the PDF is written to `output/pdf/` and copied beside this script. Outside that project, all generated files are written beside the script. Rebuilding replaces only these generated sleeve files.

All illustrations were drawn in code as original vector artwork. No image-generation service, photographs, or stock artwork was used. Everything is saved locally; no music or artwork was uploaded, and the existing audio masters and listening archive were left unchanged.