• RELEASED: 14 June 2010
• FORMAT: CD / DL / CD Promo
• LABEL: NINJA TUNE
• CAT No.: ZEN158 / ZENDNL158 / ZENCDP158
• DESIGN: Openmind / Ollie Teeba
• PHOTOGRAPHY: Openmind
• ILLUSTRATION: Openmind
• EXTRA ZEN: ninjatune page / BUY

A ‘best of’ for The Herbaliser in the same year that Ninja celebrated their 20th anniversary. Ollie‘s thoughts behind this were for a vintage medicine bottle containing the tonic of the title complete with ornate typography. He even went so far as to buy a load of old bottles of the kind he wanted so that we could illustrate it. I made up a suitable label with ripped and weathered paper, decorative type and borders from the ‘Something Wicked …’ LP which fitted perfectly to the theme.

An initial idea of the bottles with said label as the front cover was ditched, I think because the label was too small to properly be readable. A folded card CD promo then had the label wrapped round it and the bottle on the CD with the centre hole as the entry point for the liquid. At this point though I had to bow out because of continuing work on the Ninja Tune XX box set which swallowed nearly a year of my life design-wise. I got Adam Cain to come in and he bought his graphic and illustrative expertise in to finish the retail CD package (not shown here) taking my initial designs as a starting point.