R&P 8: Creating An Album Cover

Creating An Album Cover

As a practise task our teacher set us a task of creating an album cover just purely based on the name of the artist/band.

Below is the list of artist names which we could choose from:

• Loveless
• Good Samaritan(s)
• Daisycutter
• Dirty Ballerina
• M1LK
• Imagination Station
• Cryptych
• Leon Smith
• Joleen
• Stone

My choice

I eventually choose Imagination Station to pursue. My first decision was to decide on what genre I thought this artist would fit into to.  Based on the name I concluded that the genre was Alternative Jazz/Funk. In order to even have an idea of an album cover I looked at common conventions of the genre's visual style. Upon research I looked at album covers which could help me base my visual style on.

I noticed when looking at 'alternative' album covers I noticed a few common conventions. Their is a lot of natural imagery and they are often strange and out of the ordinary as demonstrated by the Bowie album cover. The next step for me was to create a mood board to collect my thoughts on Pinterest:

Mood Board

Using my mood boards I started drafting some ideas on paper of album concepts. Also taking a few images in the hope of inspiring myself.

Now that I had some good ideas of what I wanted in terms of visual style I headed to Photoshop to put together some rough ideas and see if they could come to life.

Below are two drafts which I put together just to see how it would look. I decided I much preferred the second draft however I feel like the outline of the artists takes away from the world 'imagination' because your view of the artist and album is restricted to the silhouette. I wanted my artist to be anonymous so that the music is the main priority of the album.

(Original Image)

After creating these album covers I noticed that the visual style was not successfully representing the artist. Although the natural and calming imagery is representative of the music the artist itself is African-American and their African heritage really comes through in the music. I wanted to implement some of this within the Album cover. Another weakness I noticed was not being able to see the title due to the background being dark. I have established that my final album colour will focus on making the title clear and constructing a visual style based on my artist.

What has this post taught me?

This post helped me to establish a good ideas for my album cover going forward and helped improve my Photoshop skill set so I can easily create any visual style I choose to.