I am going to do some research into album covers that are all from the same genre. The reason that I am doing this is so that I can get a better understanding of what album covers are like in the genre of our band, and also perhaps to get a little bit of inspiration from other album artworks. After finding out about album artworks and digipaks in the last blogpost, I do have certain predictions and presumptions about our album cover that I think I am going to find out if I am correct after the research today. Firstly, I think that it is more likely that our album cover is going to be a photoshoot cover. The reason that I say this is that the majority of the similar artists that I have researched into up until this point have have photoshoot album covers as opposed to concept artwork album covers. I am now going to do some research into this to see if I am right.
1. Miley Cyrus - Plastic Hearts
This is the front cover for the Miley Cyrus album. As you can see, she is such an established artist that she doesn't need to have her name written boldly on the front cover, and she just has the name of the album, and her looking very punk rocky. It is also very worth noting that this colour-way is very similar to the one that we have designed for at least 2 of the costumes (and slightly for the set) for the band in our music video.
Also, the back cover has the same dark and pink colour-way, with a slightly washy blue over the photo of her face. She abides by the roles of having a numbered song list, a barcode and the legal information on the bottom. It is worth noting that all of the writing, including the legal information is in the same pink font. She also has the name of the album on the back again. Finally, one really cool thing that she has done is columned the tracks into 4 different sections labelled Side A, Side B etc. This is how it would be laid out if this was a vinyl record, but this is the CD digipak, and so she has tried to give it a nostalgic and vintage feel just by laying out the tracks in the same way as they would be on a vinyl.
2. No Doubt - Magic Kingdom
"Magic Kingdom" is the third studio album from the band No Doubt, and so it is still relatively early into their career in the music industry. This is the only album cover that I am going to be analysing that is not a photoshoot album style, but in fact a concept artwork style album cover.
The front cover does abide by the general rule of thumb that the name of the band should be the biggest and boldest text on the front cover, and second to that is that name of the album "Tragic Kingdom" in a similar font, but in italics. The album cover does show Gwen Stefani in front of a circular portal/picture with 4 men behind her (who we may assume are members of the band but also may not be), but this is still clearly a concept album artwork, and although I didn't think that we would have conceptual artwork for our album cover, I think it works really nicely hear, and makes the album cover very memorable.
3. Avril Lavigne - The Best Damn Thing
"The Best Damn Thing" is the third studio album by the Canadian pop rock singer Avril Lavigne. As you can see, this is another photoshoot album cover, and it is quite different from both No Doubt's album cover and also from Miley Cyrus's (especially in terms of colour way).
The front cover is very simple for this album cover. Again, it abides by the rule that the name of the artist is the biggest and clearest writing on the album, with the name of the album being the second. The colour way is Pink and White, which is quite similar to the barbie sets colour-way that we have planned for our music video shoot, which is interesting. The font and the cool graphics behind the font do also add to the album cover without distracting from her too much.
The back cover again follows all the needed procedures that the previous albums have also been able to follow. In addition to this, there is another photo of the artist, and it has the song list (and what looks like a dvd section of the album) written in a different font to the legal information so that it pops out. Also, the bright shade of pink that the song list is written in contrasted with the white background really makes it pop out even more.
4. Kelly Clarkson - Meaning of Life
This is Kelly Clarkson's eighth studio album, released in October 2017 with Atlanta Records. This is yet another photo shoot album cover, and it is another very simplistic one, much like the Avril Lavigne album cover.
The front cover of Kelly Clarkson's "Meaning of Life" album is again very simplistic. It is purely just a photo of her holding her her forward wearing some darker toned lipstick (keeping in touch with the genre conventions). However, her name is not so visible on the album, and I cannot see it at all so it may not even be there. This is because she is already such an established artist at this time (eighth studio album) and so she doesn't need to distract from the album artwork with her name. However, the name of the album certainly does need to be written, and it is written in a cool circular design in the top left of the album.
In conclusion, I think that this research task went well, and I learnt a lot of things and techniques that I think could be potentially used in our album artwork (for example, the No Doubt "Magic Kingdom" back cover with the lamppost and the barcode). In addition to this, I think that my prediction about it being more likely that our album artwork has more of a chance of being a photoshoot style was correct.
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