Album Cover and Artwork: Initial Ideas and Designs

This post has been arranged chronologically, showing the progression of our design ideas and how we got to our final album cover.

Initially, Alice did some research into fonts. She was looking for sans-serif fonts as our research into other indie album covers showed that bold sans-serif are very typical of the genre, (and look good). She looked on dafont.com and found nine fonts that she liked. Below are four of them that I liked in particular.



Primetime

Cocogoose

Triomphe

Alte Haas Grotesk

After finding these fonts, we used them to create some initial designs for our album cover. Alice found some textures online as well as some publicity shots for other bands that were fairly similar to what we want ours to look like. She then created the images below. None of them are intended to be final designs and are instead meant to be experiments with different ideas to see what works and what the group likes. 

Alice's Designs

(click images to enlarge them)

I like her use of texture in the background and the white border that she used in the first picture. I also think that having a black and white shot of the band looked very good. I used all these ideas and tried to build upon them for my first designs while adding my own ideas. I used a different shot of an indie band called Metronomy because I liked its composition and it had a white background which makes it easier to work with in Photoshop.

My Designs

(click images to enlarge them)

My favourite designs out of these are the top left one and the black and white one. I don't particularly like the textures that I used and the logo isn't very clear in some of the designs which is a big problem. I do like the overall idea though and I think the simpler designs look better which is something I kept in mind when making my next designs.

Alice's Designs (Continued)

(Click images to enlarge them)

I really like these four images. In particular, the top left and bottom right designs stand out as I like the paper texture that is used and the colour schemes of both. I also like the fonts used in the logos of these two images, (Cocogoose and Alte Haask Grotesk). However I thought that the image was too small in bottom right picture and thought that the top left one would look better with some kind of border. Again, these were all points that I kept in mind for future designs that I worked on. We also noticed that the logo Alice used was very similar to Muse's logo and changed it for our future designs.

Alice, Mahalia and I then looked at Alice's designs and thought about what we liked about them and how they could be improved. We didn't think the black logo fitted with the colour scheme but we liked the textures used and the frame-in-a-frame idea. We then started to work on a design together and created the image below.

The image abov is close to what our final album cover will look like. We have used a picture of Clean Bandit for this design which we will obviously replace with a shot of our band. However we really like the paper texture in the background and the vintage colour scheme. After making this, Alice and I worked on improving it a bit by experimenting with shadows and adding depth. We created the two pictures below.

I then made the next two designs below where the letters' outlines are defined by their shadows. I also made a design where the picture was black and white but I thought the picture lacked colour overall. When I showed this font idea to my group, Kayvon liked it but Alice and Mahalia weren't as keen and thought that it wasn't eye-catching enough and that the word was a little hard to read.

Me and Kayvon then worked on these designs using a different picture of Metronomy. I like the effect in the second design where the paper texture in the background slightly shows through and the composition of the photo is quite nice.

This design is very close to what our final cover will be. I really like the use of texture for the text and the shadow and the desaturated picture look very indie. Mahalia was a bit concerned that the text covers too much of the picture but we agreed that this design would work well for the inner sleeve. We will look over all our designs as a group and work together to create our final cover.