R+P Post 10: Album covers that have inspired and influenced my ideas

Album covers are an important part of promoting the artist's image and showing something about what sort music the artist makes. The three main things that a debit album cover need to do are; show the genre; attract attention; and connote artist identity/image.

For our album cover, we wanted to have a colourful theme as our music video and artist also follow this theme of colour and vibrancy. We looked at AlunaGeorge's album covers to see what their current style is and then we looked at other artists' album covers to get our ideas for our own. I think album covers are important because they allow for the artist's image to come across the audience clearly based on what images get selected for the cover. They also allow for synergy between the artist's cover, website, social media, etc. as they will follow the same themes, colours and ideas.

Example of AlunaGeorge's album covers

Aluna and George both feature on their album covers, it isn't just Aluna (the main singer) as one might expect, so this is something we want to take ideas from and put both of our artists that make up the group on our album cover.

However, these albums covers are quite monotonous in terms of colour and don't have the eye-catching appeal that we want to incorporate in ours. We will focus more on the vibrancy of the cover and making sure that the colours are synergistic with everything else that we create.

A couple of the album covers of other artist's are; Lily Allen 'The Fear' and Kanye West 'Graduation'.

Both of these album covers are bright and eye-catching. Lily Allen's (left) shows Lily sitting on the 'A' which gives us inspiration as to how we can position our girl and boy in a unique way. Kanye West's (right) makes use of animation and random images which make the album interesting to look at. The soft purple and pink colours influence our ideas as our artist is more skewed towards a femal target audience and these are traditionally girly colours. We chose both a UK artist and an American artist to see the albums portrayed any differences in their music culture, but neither album has direct reference to their country's music scene. Lily Allen has music of the snythpop genre and so her album cover is more an influence to us as our chosen track is also synthpop/electro. The album cover is quite simple and not jammed with different images which is something we will take influence from, so that our artist can clearly be seen and all the attention is on them, although it will be a catchy album cover overall.

We've jotted some of these ideas down in a notebook that we made at the beginning of our research + planning phase.

After having researched album covers, we discovered that some of the conventional features are:

• artist name and album name
• institutional information (e.g. record label and logo)
• consistent colour scheme that is synergistic with artist's other platforms
• link to artist website and contacts
• promo sticker (e.g. parent advisory or 2 for 1 offer)
• focal image either abstract or photograph)

We will aim to include all of these conventions when performing our task which is to create a 4 pannel digipack for our album cover.