Planning - Album Cover Research

In order for our album cover to look professional and suitable for the music industry it is importnat that we research existing album and CD covers so we are able to get an idea of what is important for a CD cover and what makes it an effective one. The CD cover will be the visual representation of our chosen song and will be the first thing a customer will see if they were to buy it in the shops. Therefore it is to be eye catching and aesthetically pleasing making the customer want to pick it up. Below are some of the album and CD covers we researched.

Above is the album cover for B.o.B's album Strange clouds. The cover is dominated by the photograph of the artist and the graphics behind him. It is clear that the images have been manipulated in some way to get the desired effect. This may mean that we will have to use Adobe Photoshop for the creation of our software to also achieve the effects we want. As well as a photograph we may also want to include graphics like this album cover as I believe it gives it an abstract feel making it pleasing to look at. At the very top the artist name and the album name can be seen. An idea that we may well incorporate into our album cover.

I believe it is important that we research CD covers into our chosen artist so we are able to get a feel of the direction that the artist will take in making a CD cover. Below shows Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak CD cover.


The selling point for this CD cover I believe is the simplicity. A simple image in the middle of the broken heart with the name of the artist at the top and the name of the CD at the bottom. However I don't believe the colour chosen for the writing at the bottom is the most effective as white on light grey makes the writing hard to see therefore hard to read. Seeing this we will be able to diverge away from this and not make this mistake. As a group we liked the idea of the broken heart in the middle and this will be something that we will most definitely include on our CD cover. We also think that we will also match the simplicity as this will match the theme of the song, the sombre tone and the subject of heartbreak.

The last album cover we researched was by a fellow Rap/R'n'B artist, Drake's Take Care. It was important that we looked at other album covers within the same genre so we know what other artists are doing and how we can improve on what they have done. Below is the album cover:


This album cover also proves to be simple. So simple that Drake's name is not even featured on it. The striking feature of the art work is the consistent colour scheme. The gold colour scheme makes it stand out and will definitely catch your eye if placed on a shelf at a store. The group discussed the concept of having a colour scheme for our CD cover to not overwhelm the customer. We were all in favour of this but the specific colour scheme has not yet been decided. Another striking fact about this album cover is that a photograph dominates the entire frame. I believe this is important to the overall feel of the CD cover as it gives it a sense of reality in comparison to using graphics. We believe that this will be something that we will want to incorporate into our music video however ours will serve as a background with maybe graphics layed on top.

-BYRAN FERROL-