Today Is a Beautiful Day
felt using strings in "Hoshi ga Matataku Konna Yoru ni" was an essential part of the song; Crusher Kimura provides the strings for three songs on the album. Haruko Ohinata is credited for the chorus of the song "Utakata Hanabi". "Today Is A Beautiful Day" was mixed by Takeshi Hara, Yasuhisa Kataoka, Keiji Kondo, Masashi Kudo, Eiji Makino, Koji Morimoto, Okuda Supa, and Shuji Yamaguchi. Yuji Chinone provided the mastering.
The limited edition of "Today Is A Beautiful Day" came bundled with a 36-page full-color illustration booklet titled "Supercell Works 2: 2009 Summer-2011 Spring". The booklet contains color illustrations for the songs, as well as comments by Ryo, Nagi Yanagi and the illustrators, an interview of Supercell members, and other details about the songs and artwork, including lyrics. The albums' packaging, designed by Yoshiki Usa, includes the song lyrics and some of the illustrations featured in "Supercell Works 2". Each song is given an illustration by an artist, which include members outside of the band in addition to members of Supercell. These illustrators are listed below with the track listing. The cover art is by Shirow Miwa and shows a girl in a blue dress smiling in front of an assortment of flowers on a tan background. The limited edition came with a design case illustrated by Redjuice featuring a girl with luggage in tow in a rural setting walking next to an old-fashioned blue car.
"Today Is A Beautiful Day" was released on March 16, 2011 in two editions: a regular CD version and a CD+DVD limited edition. The DVD contained an anime music video of the song "Perfect Day". Also on the DVD are trailers for the anime film "Cencoroll", the visual novel "Mahtsukai no Yoru", and Shueisha's manga magazine "Aoharu", as well as a commercial for "Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari" and the anime "Bakemonogatari". For the week of March 14, 2011 on Oricon's weekly albums chart, "Today Is A Beautiful Day" was reported to have sold over 34.000 copies in its first week of sales, peaking at No. 3, and charted for 42 weeks. In July 2011, "Today Is A Beautiful Day" was awarded a Gold Disc by the Recording Industry Association of Japan for having exceeded 100.000 copies shipped in a single year.
The DVD bundled with the album's limited edition included an anime music video of the song "Perfect Day" produced by Madhouse. It was directed by Rysuke Nakamura, with animation direction by Mieko Hosoi. The character design is based on original designs by Shirow Miwa. The video shows a girl with short, blue hair coming back to the town where she used to live. The girl reminisces about the time she spent with another girl with long, light brown hair years before when they were children. The two had fun around town, and during one day the wind blew the hat off the girl with brown hair. While walking around town, the two girls meet by chance, shocking both of them, but both are happy to each other again. The hat from years before lands in
front of the blue-haired girl, much to her surprise, and she puts it on. Contrails are mentioned twice in the song as a part of the chorus and images of them are seen throughout the video. Nakamura says the video is about life and dreams, and he used the song as inspiration to make the video as a side story to the song's lyrics. He explains that the two girls are actually one person that chose different paths in life, and describes their chance meeting as a "somewhat magical winter day."