Photomontage Project - Album Covers

CD Cover Research

As part of the photomontage project, we were asked to research into pre-existing album covers. I tried to look into varied styles so as to get a general idea of what the main features of an album cover consist of and what the common traits are between them.

Album covers are not constrained to one type or style of art, instead they allow room for creativity. While some album covers relate to the songs contained within or even the name of the album, others display artwork that is simply eye-catching. Though there is a free rein to create in album cover design, genres of music often inspire certain styles of art. 

For example, pop or electronic genres usually have a lot of colour on them, sometimes contrasted by a dark background while rock/metal genres use more murky and dark colours to fit their theme.

Pop Example

Metal Example

Though this mostly applies to modern album covers, it is a trend also followed by older cover artwork. With the development of digital work, modern covers can often feature photo manipulation and other added effects while older work contains art created by hand or photographs of the music artists.

When it came to creating my own album covers, I tried to keep to this at the forefront of my designs. I decided that it would help to create a made up band 'Cypher' and give it a genre of electronic music so that I could aim for a specific style that would suit the theme of the music. I noticed a lot of covers of that genre feature vibrant (usually rainbow or spectrum) colours contrasted with a dark or black background. From this, I created several covers that I felt fit these themes.

My work:

Although I liked all of these covers, my final design was very different. For my final design, my background was white and contrasted with the main image, which had dark green and blue colours. I think both the skull and the colours I chose fit the genre of music I decided to aim for.

I think that I achieved what I set out to do with this part of the project and I enjoyed using the freedom in creativity that album covers provide to experiment digitally and expand on ideas. I believe that this experimentation helped me when creating other digital work in the following projects.