The first album cover I decided to look at is by T.I - Paper Trails. Even though this album by the famous American rapper was released back in 2008 (just over 4 years ago), it has stuck in my mind, which is what a successful piece of art work does, it captures the visual creative before the music is even heard, and I aim to try and achieve this for our own album cover for The Script.
As you can see the front of the album cover has the artist's (T.I's) face on the front - this gives the audience facial recognition of the artist along with the text. Also the title "Paper Trails" is merged with the cover its self and the album cover is made from different segments of paper (from various sizes and colours) to make the face and also the background for the album cover. because there is so much going on within the album cover, keeping the text simple is what I personally would have done because it compliments the art work well. The back cover consists of the track listings that have been done in "Type-writer" font and again this emphasises the point about having a paper background. Along with the album track listing, the bar-code is also seen, along with the Copyrights to the art work and the record label.
Moving away from the hip-hop scene I looked more into more Indie styled music, and for this I turned to "Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worst Nightmare". This is a more subtle approach for the art work, because its supposed to represent the style of music that the band is creating.
This album cover, unlike the previous one uses colour to help lure the creativity of the audience, but both album covers use the title to represent the art work being displayed. For example here the majority of the album cover is in gray scale (which indicated night time) and the windows are full of bright colours (which are the opposite of nightmares which are usually more darker, sinister colours). If you look closely you can see that the shapes inside the windows are all round (bouncy) opposing the thoughts of it being a nightmare. The back cover is what has grabbed me personally, because the traditional way of viewing the track listings is in a list descending own the page, where as here the titles for each track are found near the bottom (where the bar-code, record label and copyrights are displayed) and the go from left to right with a huge gap between each song.
The final album cover that I shall be looking at is from the drum and bass genre and the chosen artist/band being "Pendulum - In Silico". All of Pendulum's albums are very vibrant and they have to be to, again, represent the genre of music.
This album cover is alive with colours, giving off very vibrant tones which are then given and outer glow to make them stand out even more. This album cover has a double meaning to what you (the audience) can see. At first glance you may think that the image is displaying a very colourful speaker backed onto a circuit board. However, if you look closely the center of the "speaker" contains an "embryo/featus", and the circuitry is actually individual "sperm cells", making the "speaker" the "egg", and yet again this is what the title relates to, even the song titles relate to what the album cover represents if you take your time in unraveling the artwork. Same with the 2 previous album covers the record label and copyrights are located on the bottom, however this version of the album does not contain a bar-code. In conclusion to looking at the 3 album covers, it is important to make sure that when designing the album cover we make sure that it is eye-catching to make it more memorable for the audience. We need to make it different to other album covers, but yet similar so that people understand whats going on, but it is different to the generic layouts.
Written By Tyrone.
No comments:
Post a Comment