Album Cover Design

My first assignment, as part of an introduction to graphic design, was designing an album cover. However, the various elements were decided randomly, which will be discussed later, thus enabling me to focus on design principles and familiarising myself more with the tools of Photoshop.

The band name was generated by the title of a random Wikipedia article, the title of the album was the last four to five words of a random quote, and the photograph was selected as a random interesting Flickr photo. For my album cover the following were selected:

Band Name - "prohibition".

Album Title - "wake up in despair".

Photo - as seen in screenshot 1.

Screenshot 1 - Original Picture

The main elements which I liked in this photo was the line running through the photo, and the eye shaped object on the left hand side. In order to focus on these elements, the photo was enlarged and rotated, so that the line was more vertical and placed further left, so it was not as centralised, creating a more interesting composition, by dividing the space.

In addition the texture, another interesting element of the original photo, was enhanced by sharpening the edges and a tint was added to make the photo appear even more abstract. The red was chosen to produce an almost eerie feeling, and was also inspired the red patches present in the original, to produce the image shown in screenshot 2.

Screenshot 2 - Adjusted Image

What next needed to be placed however was the text, including the band name and album title. The vertical line in the image inspired the placing of text in a vertical orientation. What was important was that it was still easy to read, so the whole text wasn't rotated, but instead was written in columns, as shown in screenshot 3.

Screenshot 3 - First attempt with typography

The typography chosen was Franklin Gothic Book, and was chosen because it was simple, graphic, modern and understated so it wouldn't detract from the image, and also help to enhance the modern, abstract feel of the image. The band name was placed down the right hand side, centralised vertically (as ensured by the grid lines). The same type was also used for the album title, to help the text feel cohesive, although contrast was also added by the smaller size of the album title, and that it was all in lower case in contrast to the band's name all in upper case.

The initial thought was that the album's title would appear almost like tear streaks underneath the eye. Once placed however, the text was hard to read, as seen in screenshot 3, and so instead the text was placed horizontally in three lines with varying lengths, to echo the circular shape of the eye, thus highlighting the contrast between the circular eye and the vertical bisecting line. This was achieved by using the typography tools to stretch the text. Grid lines were also used to ensure the bottom of the band name and album title were aligned, as seen in screenshot 4.

Screenshot 4 - Almost finished album cover

 After some final tweaks, including adjustments of brightness and adding a drop shadow to enhance the band's name against the slightly dark background, it resulted in the final album cover design, as shown below.

Final album cover design

The final album cover design, in the end, I think is an interesting piece, and is different to many other album covers, especially in regards to the position of the typography. Many album covers have the band name and title in close proximity to each other, whereas there is a big divide in this design. It is good in the sense that it is different, however one draw back might be that at first glance, one might not be too sure that it was an album cover. The image however I think works, especially the textures, and it makes the viewer question what they are actually seeing.