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<blockquote>As a companion album to 1999's ''The Fragile'', ''Things Falling Apart'' needed to closely follow [[David Carson]]'s art direction / design from ''The Fragile'' while carving out its own identity. I'd been working with Carson's style for the past year by this point, adapting it to my own designs for album and tour promo materials, websites, merchandise, and the [[Fragility]] tour book, so Trent felt confident that I was ready to tackle an album design. This was probably a much bigger deal to me than it was to him; as a die-hard NIN fan, the weight of permanently leaving my mark on the catalog of Nine Inch Nails halos (the internal numbering system used for official Nine Inch Nails releases) weighed heavily on my young shoulders.
Thankfully, I had some time throughout 2000 to prepare and experiment. It began with taking a lot of photos, as many as I could wherever I was, to start finding my own way through David Carson's direction. My photography of the flowers was of course a thematic continuation of Carson's photos for ''The Fragile'', but also of Robert Hales' work on ''[[The Day The World Went Away (songhalo)|The Day The World Went Away]]'' single, which started ''The Fragile'' era's flower theme in a much more formal style than Carson's.
Carson was a design hero of mine, so of course playing in his style was exhilarating but also very intimidating for a very young, very new designer. A lot of Carson's imagery was abstract snapshots of his surroundings that he'd capture unconventionally, sometimes with disposable cameras and polaroids, recontextualizing small details of found objects into abstract art and then employing it thematically into his designs (the red texture on the cover of ''The Fragile'' is an out-of-focus snapshot of the inside of a conch shell, for example). To find my own way of adapting his approach, I began experimenting with a macro lens for the first time.