PLANNING - ALBUM COVER

THINKING ABOUT IDEAS FOR OUR ALBUM COVER

Taking into account the research that we've done on album covers (particularly the covers of Leona Lewis, Beyonce and Taylor Swift) we found that the album cover is often a reflection of the music contained on the album. For example, if it's a album containing soft pop songs, the cover will usually be very emotional to fit the mood of the songs.

I also felt that it was important to ask people what they expected to see in a CD cover for this genre of music and i generally found that people expected to see things like a close-up beauty shot of the artists face, album name and artist name, and tracklisting on the back.



Here is the layout of the CD Digipak that we are going to design. We will do the back cover, which will have track listings. We will do the front cover, with the artist and album name. We will do the inside left which will have an image of the artist on it and the inside right (underneath the CD) will have an image on it, but we are thinking it won't be of the artist it will be on an object (like a candle)






We've decided that as our music video and its song is quite emotional, to fit with the video our album digipak would also have to evoke the same emotions as the video, therefore being a striking image. We have decided that we would like to have the actress we used in the video featured on our album cover as this is often seen on many album covers.

We have been gathering some ideas and doing some sketches of possible designs of our album digipak. We will do a separate photo shoot just for the album cover would be a good idea, as most album covers are from photo shoots, carefully planned out so we will follow conventions.

Some of these idea's are:

• Having a simple close-up shot of her face, with an emotional expression (like Leona Lewis or Beyonce's Covers)
• Having her holding a candle, like she does in the video, wearing one of the same dresses in the video (possibly the white dress) and the same hair and make-up.
• Having a spot light on her.

We don't want to over complicate the Album Cover, as we think that a simple idea will work best with the song and the genre of music, for example, animated album covers would not fit the genre of the music. An emotion evoking image would be much more effective when portraying the mood of the music and the song.

Here are some sketches of possible photo's that we are going to take on our photo shoot which we have organized:

When we get to do the actual photo shoot, we will try different angles of each shot, as each idea is just a rough idea that we are going to play around with on the actual day of the photo shoot.

This is a shot of her sitting in the corner of a room with the light only on her.









Here is a close up of her holding a candle. The background will be just black and the candle will illuminate her face. We will do this without the candle also.







We are also thinking about using screen shots from our video as the album cover as this is also seen sometimes, and this will make sure that the right emotions are evoked as the picture is taken straight from the video.


Here are some possible screen shots that we have decided that we could use:
















































These are the sort of images that we are looking to capture in our photo shoot. We may try to recreate some of these images, as it would be better to do them again as proper photos instead of just screen shots.

As for the back and inside front of the digipak these will also contain similar images as we want all of them to follow on from eachother and to relate, so we don't confuse the audience. None of them are going to be complicated and they will allow follow the same colour scheme.

Another aspect of the Album cover that's important is the font that the title and artists name is written in. As we are opting for a simple album cover, all it's going to have on it is the image and the title, so it needs to be chosen carefully otherwise it will look ot of place.


Here are some examples where the font choices on these album covers work very well:



This album "Riot" is a fast paced rock album by the band Paramore. The use of a quite rough font helps portray what the album is going to be like, and also fits the title "Riot" which obviously is a negative word. The fact that it's written in capitals shows this too. The font choice really reflects the music also as it makes me think of "aggression" and fits with the cover well.





This font use really contrasts with the above one. This album by 'Leona Lewis mainly contains soft love songs, and the font 'Spirit' is very soft and reflects the album name and the songs on the album and fits well with the album image of her looking very soft and feminine. The use of the Calligraphy font is very good at portraying softness and is a very feminine font, apposed to print type fonts.




Together, we all chose a few different fonts that we believed would work quite well, after we have done the photo shoot and chosen our final photo, we will decide on the font that will fit best.
Here are the fonts that we like (I've used the words of the song title "cosmic love" to show the font):

Another very important factor is the Album name itself. The album name also very much reflects the music on the album. As above "spirit" would suggest soft, love very soulful songs. Whereas "Riot!" would definitely suggest a very progressive, more up tempo sound.

We are going to start thinking of a suitable, "soft" album name that will fit with the album image.

We have planned the photo shoot date for Sunday the 29th of November, and have thought about the advert also, we are not going to do a separate shoot for the advert as we are going to use the image of the album cover in the advert.