Looking into Album Covers that are already out there.

An album cover is very important to an artist. It has to be eye catching and stand out from the millions already out in the market, but it also has to reflect on the band/singer. They can either chose to be on the cover or to have an abstract photo or piece of artwork to represent the whole album and the feelings to the songs. There is not just the front cover to think about, there is also the back of the CD/LP case/cover and how they will display the song titles. Then there is the inside of the case/cover and the CD design itself. And sometimes there is a booklet included, it might have all the lyrics to the songs printed inside or it might just be photos of the singer/band members in poses or while they are rehearsing. Since I will be designing and creating my own CD/LP designs I will need to take all of this into consideration. The first thing I decided to look at was some of the albums that I own, this would be part of my primary research on what is already out there.

I put them into 2 piles: -Covers with the artist on

                                                                 -Covers with artwork and abstract photos on

These are the CD covers that don't have the artists on the front. You can see that there is quite a range of designs from drawing and paintings to photo manipulation.

This Snow Patrol album is called 'A Hundred Million Suns And Stars' and the main design around the whole album is millions of coloured origami suns and stars hanging on string. The main design for the background in the booklet is photos from different angles of all these paper stars. There is one for the front cover too.

The track list on the back of the case looks like it has been written on a chalk board.

This album cover is quite well known. When people think about Greenday, they think of this cover.

The whole of the inside of this booklet is written like the inside of a sketch pad for an angry teen. 

These have the artists on the cover. None of the photos are normal portraits, apart from the Will Young cover, and even then he is stood in the middle of an empty road, which fits in well with the title of the album, 'Echoes'. For the Florence album, she is sat in front of a mirror so that there are more then one of her in the shot. The Noel Gallagher album it is blurred to add movement. In the Maroon 5 album they are all in mid air in mid-movement apart from the lead singer, who is just stood up straight. 

Maroon 5 have  few albums out but the 2 I have, have very different covers. One has the band on the front and the other has a woman with 2 pairs of arms wrapped around her, 1 pair is hers and the other is a mans. The album is called 'Hand All Over' so this is a very fitting cover.

This Florence album has a very short booklet but there are no lyrics in it, there are just photos of her and a poem.

This Caro Emerald album folds out 2 times.

I like how different that is from all the others.

Another thing I found out was that there were 2 shapes of the album cases. Some had the regular corners but the newer albums had rounded edges to the cases. And some album cases were made of paper, I think this is an eco friendly method because it saves using so much plastic to make the cases.