Album Artwork
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Album Artwork Time line
1939
The first ever album cover by Alex Steinweiss Which was made for LPs replacing plain covers previously used. The introduction of illustrated album covers increased sales so many other record labels followed. 2
Album Artwork Time line
1940s
A lot of early album covers where hand illustrated as they did not have the technology to create them digitally at this time. The covers where quite simple and used a limited range of colours as they didn’t have the technology to print many colours. The album artwork above for Louis Armstrong’s hot 5 was done by artist Jim Flora which he did in the year 1947. He is best known for his artwork he mainly did for RCA Victor and Columbia Records in the 1940s and 50s, His artwork has a very cartoonish style and they feature very bright and bold colours.
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Album Artwork Time line
1950s
As technology advanced so did the album covers, they started to incorporate photography into them rather than them being fully hand drawn. 4
Album Artwork Time line
1955-6
Printing techniques improved and album art started to be Printed in full colour. The album artwork from this time features a lot of portrait photography of the artists more than illustrations previously. 5
Album Artwork Time line
1960s
Album artwork started to get a lot more artistic compared to the ones in previous years. A lot of the artwork in this decade had a very psychedelic feel to it and was very colourful. This is because of the artists who was psychedelic musicians who where influenced by psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin and they would reflect this in the artwork for albums. 6
Album Artwork Time line
1970s
In the 70s punk rock came around which had a DIY ethic so the artwork reflected this using many DIY methods such as collage as can be seen in the Sex Pistols cover. 7
Album Artwork Time line
1980s
In 1980 a lot of people started using cassettes so this changed how album artwork was displayed as LPs where in a square format and cassettes where rectangular. In the late 80s adobe illustrator was also released. 8
Album Artwork Time line
1990s
In the 90s Photoshop was released which opened up a lot of possibilities to designers as they could now manipulate images a lot easier and do things that could’ve been hard to do before. CD players also became more affordable which meant more people started to buy CDs over cassette tapes. Computers became more powerful they also began using CGI in album artwork such as in the Now That’s What I Call Music artwork. 9
Album Artwork Time line
2000s
Technology has advanced a lot over the years and a lot can be done using computer to manipulate images and create 3D models and such. Tools such as Photoshop and illustrator have become a lot more advanced and more powerful allowing a lot more to be done digitally. Tools and filters such as the content aware fill tool and the liquify filter have been added to Photoshop which allows you to do much more. 10
Design influence
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Digital Manipulation
For my design influence I am going to focus on an abstract and surrealist style of album artwork. I am going to look at digitally manipulating photos to create a surreal and abstract album cover. This style of artwork is a much more recent style as programs such as photo shop have become more powerful there has been more tools to help create surrealist manipulations. Using a program such as Photoshop you can put different images together adjust them to create a realistic image from them.
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Mario Hugo
Mario Hugo is part of Hugo & Marie creative agency and has designed album artwork for a few clients. His designs focus on typography and are very abstract by not making the text easily visible. Such as the middle image where the text looks like it is blending into the background. His covers also features high contrast and contain very muted colours rather than bright bold colours. He has done album artwork for artists such as Hanne Hukkelberg who is a jazz vocalist and he has also done work for the popular singer Rihanna. The artwork below on the right was created by using ink stains that where then masked into the typography.
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Leif Podhajsky
Leifs is an Australian graphic designer who’s work is very psychedelic and features a lot of use of textures. His album covers focus on the artwork more than the typography on the cover as it is usually placed in the corner and looks very basic in terms of the font and colours used. The middle artwork looks like It could’ve have been done by just marbling paper and the bottom one using the same technique but then editing it on Photoshop to create the pattern in it by inverting sections of the image.
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Carolina NiĂąo
Niùo’s designs feature a lot of image that are mirrored and flipped around to create symmetry and patterning in her art work. The images used in her work are natural objects such as plants and trees used in these images but because they have been cropped, copied, pasted and flipped it can be a little hard to tell what they are from a first glance this makes them very abstract, They also look very geometrical. The type of music that she makes artwork for is very experimental and I think that her artwork reflects this.
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Artist Analysis Carolina Ni単o
I have chosen this album cover for Monokle - Swan. The pictures main focal point is the middle of the image where the text is, the dark text is on a white lighter colour circle which has a high contrast helping to draw the viewer in to the middle. It is also helped by the way the image is composed like a circle surrounding the main text. The image is made up of natural objects such as minerals and plants that have been cut out and placed over each other. They have then been copied and flipped to create a symmetrical pattern in the image. I think that the artwork reflects the music it is made phone as it is quite abstract music. 16
In this piece of artwork the text is not centred like in the other but I still think the composition of the image helps draw your eyes into the centre of the image. The images that have been used to create this artwork look like images of flowers that just like in the last piece have been flipped to make them symmetrical.
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Practical Investigations
On this layer I changed the colour of the picture using a hue/saturation adjustment to change it to blue so it goes with the crystal.
This is a picture of a shell that I scanned in myself the mirrored.
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Idea 1
This was my first idea; I don’t really like this one as I think it is too messy and does not fit together very well. I think that there are too many colours in the image and they don’t go together very well. I think that the background I used on the image is also very distracting and has too much going on in it. But I think the images that I have used in the image go together well overall just the colours in them do not go. I think that the split circle in the middle goes too as it splits up the symmetry in the image.
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I cut out parts of the images then copied and flipped them to create symmetrical shapes from them.
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Idea 2
This was my second idea and I think that this one came out a lot better than the first one I did. The colours in the image complement each other a lot better than the other as I tried to stick to using a colour scheme with the images I chose to use to make it. The composition of the image helps to lead the viewers eyes into the centre of the image which is the title of the band, this is helped because the white text is on top of a darker colour so there is a good contrast between the two and it is easily visible. The background of the image is very subtle and does not distract the viewer from the main part of the image.
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I added black outer glows to the seperate parts which helped to create depth within the image.
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Idea 3
This was my third idea and I also like this one too, in this one I also tried to stick to a colour scheme again which I think creates a better looking image. I used a square instead of a circle in the middle of the image which I don’t looks too bad but I don’t think it looks as good as a circle does. I also do not think that background on this image is as good and does not blend in with the main part of the image very well.
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Final Piece Planning
For my final piece I am going to design an album cover for the Russian electronic musician Monokle. I am going to use the different techniques that I have tried out in photo shop and that worked well to create artwork in the style of Carolina Ni単o. For my final piece I am going to use a colour scheme to using colours that go well together, so I am going to use green, yellow and pink as I think these colours will work well together and I think they would work well on a dark background. From my tests I think the one that worked the best was the second one as I like the circular shape and think it works much better than the third one where I used a square in the middle of the image.
These are the different images I used to create the image. I took parts of these images and then copied and flipped them to create a symmetrical image. Sticking with my colour scheme I got images of crystals that where these colours. I used the image of the stars and cloud and changed the blend modes to lighten to get rid of the dark colours in these pictures. I chose the images of crystals as these worked really well in my tests and created looked very surreal when they were mirrored. 24
Final Piece Development
I first started my final piece by mirroring the crystal images and arranging them on top of each other. I added an outer glow to them to help create some depth to the image and then mirrored the star image and set the layer mode to screen. I then added various adjustment layers such as vibrance, selective colour and curves to increase the contrast and change the colours slightly to blend the images together better. I added the cloud image on top then desaturated it, increased the contrast and set the blend mode to screen to only show the light tones. I added another image of star and again set the blend mode to screen; I then applied the image and blurred it.
I masked this layer to blur the background of the image to help create depth in the image and then added the text into the centre of the image. I applied the image and used a high pass filter and set it to soft light which sharpens the image and increases the contrast. I then added a vignette to help bring the viewers attention to the centre of the image and sharpened the photo. I finally added an outer glow to the text and increased the contrast. 25
Final Piece
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Evaluation Overall I am pleased with my final outcome, I really like the way it looks and think it works as an album cover. I think that the colours go really well together, the stars and the dark background give the image a space theme. I darkened the corners of the image and lightened the centre of it to lead the viewer’s eyes into the centre where the focus of the image is, doing this helped create negative space around the image. I think using the adjustment layers and blurring the background of the image helped create a much more realistic look. Because of the space kind of look and the crystals used I think they create a surreal looking planet. The key factors that most influenced my work from Carolina Niño’s were how her artwork is very symmetrical and the natural objects she uses in her designs, so when creating my final piece i kept this in mind to link my work to hers. I used natural objects o link my final piece back to her and made these objects symmtrical. I think my final piece matches my intentions as the album artwork as it is quite abstract and surreal. One thing that could of been done better I think is the text as it doesn’t stand out as much as it could.
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