Album cover design & influences

Before we began to design our own album artwork, we researched the conventions of existing album covers. We found that they tended to have one striking image or focal point, often (but not always) the title of the album and the artist name, a theme throughout every panel of the album to create branding, and industry necessities such as the barcode and copyright information.

We decided on a few main features we wanted for our album artwork, such as sticking to the colour scheme of our video, involving powder paint in some way, and having a picture of the artist on the cover.

Next, we began to think about the design of our album, taking artistic influence from a number of existing album covers. 

Dance music albums

Example - Live Life Living
Caribou - Our Love
Flying Lotus - You're Dead
SBTRKT - Wonder Where We Land

These albums of the same genre as our track are in the charts at the moment. They are colourful and vibrant, which seems to be a recurring theme with dance music albums. We took this in to consideration when thinking about the colour scheme of our album artwork, as we want to make sure we appeal to our target audience.

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Other inspiring albums

MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
San Cisco - San Cisco
Vampire Weekend - Contra

We were also inspired by the colours and colour gradients of the albums above. We have decided to pick similar colours of powder paint - pink, blue and purple - for our paint fight scene to create an image of branding for our artist. We particularly like the composition of the MGMT album cover with the artists standing side by side and the artist name over the top in white text. It is also similar to the Paramore album cover (below) which equally inspired us.

Paramore 

These are our first rough plans for the design of the front and back cover of our album artwork:

Front cover: two possible variations

Both these variations include a picture of the artist and the name of the artist, along with a colour gradient as the background. We are still unsure about what we want the exact composition of the artwork to be, and we intend to try a few different options when we begin creating the digipack. 

Back cover

The image of a group of friends in a forest on the back is the same place the powder paint fight will take place and is meant to create synergy between our video and the album, the same way the powder paint colour scheme will. 

For the inside cover, we plan to have a photo of our female artist blowing powder paint across the two panels, similar to the image to the right. In our shot, the paint will be the same colours as our colour scheme with a white background to emphasise the vibrancy of the colours.

This colour scheme is something that we plan to use across our video, digipak, and website to create a strong sense of branding for our artist's debut album, which is a technique used throughout the music industry.