Design Development

For my album cover development I played around with various layouts typography sizes and image sizes until I found something I though worked. I wanted an equal balance of image and type for my album covers and a consistent design throughout, so my task was to almost create a template of designs styles and rules that could be used across all album covers. My first iteration of the album covers I liked a lot. I liked the negative space and the use of type, with the logotype being central to the album cover, it was punchy and got the viewers attention, however I wanted to incorporate imagery into my covers.

My second attempt was a full bleed album cover with an inverted colour way on the type to contrast the black and white imagery. I felt this one didn’t have a great balance between image and type, despite being a template that could be used across all albums, I felt it was a bit too cluttered and the type and imagery would clash, especially across the other albums.

My third cover was more of an experimental cover focusing more on negative space and the striking impact it could have among a long list of album covers. It felt to bland and I felt the type and the imagery were lost in the negative space. There wasn’t a harmony between all three elements of the cover and that’s something I wanted to work on so it could be implemented across all covers.

My fourth cover is my final cover design/template. I feel the type, imagery and negative space all work well together with them all equally balanced on the cover. There’s a clear hierarchy between body and header text with the imagery feeling almost a part of that hierarchy. The imagery looks to work well with the type and seems to explain the album just as well as the type. The album cover uses an off white/cream and black and white colour palette picked out from the imagery used. 

The imagery is primary imagery of the band during a gig, cropped in to focus on a specific area and edited to reflect the same homemade, home-camcorder edge the poster imagery has. The cover, like the poster, has a grain to add a little ‘edge’ and keep the design style consistent. This would be my template going forward. All album covers would follow this layout, using colours picked out from the imagery of each cover with the type contrasting those colours in case of a class, with the consistent edgy, grainy texture and homemade style across each cover.