Due weekly on Sundays. Responses to others’ posts due Tuesdays. * Next week is Spring Break, therefore this assignment can be submitted on Sunday, March 16.
Week 8 — Assignment “Album Art Design”
Project 2: Experiments in Typographics Applied—a series of directed projects in which Project 1’s design exercises/experiments can be further explored and used with purpose. Continue to explore digital drawing, longer text composition, typographic design, and image systems. This week you will build upon your research and sketching, to start designing artwork for printed album covers. We will develop it into a larger visual system, including a time-based media application after spring break.
1/
Discuss:
- Revise Week 7’s text studio assignment. You will need 700–800 words (minimum) for the liner notes, so that we have some length to work with and to practice typesetting and layout. All of the text must be typed into a doc on the drive, i.e. no screenshot of text.
See my notes & example doc on the drive here. - Write about your Week 8 studio project progress (200 word minimum) as a comment below. Reply to at least two other people’s posts (below) by Tuesday.
2/
Studio:
- Design album cover sleeve and interior booklet artwork for print production—for a selected musical artist/musical group’s specific album.
- Watch the “Week 8” class video.
- Work from your Week 7 sketches. Create the digital file and the artboards/pages in Illustrator or InDesign.
Begin with the dimensions: 12.375 in x 12.375 in (Vinyl 12″ LP)
In the weeks ahead, we will explore layout (front/back cover and interior folded booklet) and how your design translates to other digital media. - Begin digital design experimentation with 1. any graphic art drawings or illustration/photo visuals; 2. typographics for the title and name; and 3. the typographic treatment of the track list, copyright, and liner notes texts. Try out many visual ideas, testing all the parts of the project (1, 2, 3) on various artboards. We will continue to refine and revise this work in the week after Spring Break.
A reminder that text includes:
artist/group name
album title
track list
copyright info/label info and
a (longer wordcount) text you wish to feature as liner notes (this can be song lyrics, a discography, artist reviews, etc.). - Package your project file from Illustrator/InDesign. Upload the packaged folder with a PDF of all of of your artboards/progress. Be sure to export your Illustrator artboards as a PDF. In Design will make the PDF if you have the button toggled on.
*featured image: Pixies, designed by Vaughan Oliver, 4AD Records
Links:
featured image: Pixies album, PGDA
Circle 2 Gathering album
Great TV Themes album
Carin Goldberg designer
Earth Quake album
Chicago IX album
Virtuoso Guitar album
The Beatles Sgt Pepper
Ray Charles album
Duran Duran album
Pop Classico album
Sex Pistols album
MOOG album
Prince album
KD Lang album
Schumann album
Bessie Smith album
Pink Floyd album
Bobby McFerrin album
Jazz Allstars
For my studio progress this week, I have been having a hard time coming up with multiple ideas for the different artboards and getting them to be cohesive with the “vibe” of the album. I have tried listening to the music while creating them and am trying to look through the various album covers from the archives to get inspiration. I was hesitant to use real images since I wanted to to a cartoon/drawing type style but was struggling to make that in illustrator (I am used to creating things like what I was trying to do in Procreate with a digital pencil). I think I will try to do a collage-style for one of them to see how it would/could look if I were to try and translate it to Procreate and back into Illustrator if that is possible.
My hope for this project is to find a color palette that is not just a copy of the originals since we are supposed to be coming up with our own ideas, however I do really like the reds and oranges on the original so I tried one to experiment with those in a different way. I want to include imagery of mountains or rocky cliffs, since that is the vibe that the album gives me, it reminds me of someone who is enjoying life, feeling a sense of freedom and just general happiness.
I appreciate this response, Aniston. Figuring out a cohesive style proves to be more difficult than it seems. I also had issues with figuring out how to find the right visuals to match with the vibe of the music I chose. This project is an interesting exercise, as it is having us think outside the box, and reimagine media that already exists. Great work!
Hi Aniston,
I like the idea of going for more of a drawing style for the album cover because I think it adds more to the creativity and allows for more of personal expression. I think that you’re doing a good job so far!
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/shared?id=%2Fpersonal%2Fr%5Friley%5Funcg%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2F%5FRachele%20Riley%2Fteaching%2FS25%2FART%20448%2FKayla%20Stiles%2FWeek%208&listurl=%2Fpersonal%2Fr%5Friley%5Funcg%5Fedu%2FDocuments
For my album project I am focusing on the 2005 Gorillaz album “Demon Days”. I decided to keep the theme of a rugged, dark, street-like style as there are a lot of late 90’s to early 2000’s alternative and hip-hop elements in the music. The album creates a gloomy atmosphere and storyline, so I wish to use an edgy aesthetic. My main color scheme will be using reds, blacks, and whites. The typography will have a hand-written element to it, as it appears uneasy, rushed, and imperfect. Textures such as brick, concrete, and metal will be used as a nod to the industrial scenes seen in the animated music videos accompanying the album. So far I have started basic experiments with the type and imagery. As it is an alternative album, I want the design to be quirky while still maintaining its serious nature. Moving forward, I will be finishing up a few hand-drawn illustrations for the cover art, making final designs on the layout, and ensuring that the album design is cohesive and visually interesting.
Hi Kayla,
I like the combination of the textures and font used for the album cover; I think you did a good job in replicating that alternative and hip-hop street style in your work. I can’t wait to see what you decide to do next with this!
Week 8’s studio was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the freedom and range we had this week to design a vinyl cover, liner notes, and back of the vinyl cover. At first, I looked over my week 7 cover and disliked its slickness and wanted a more homemade feel, so I added effects such as textures for my creatures, a grainy texture. I didn’t like how smooth Week 7’s cover was for the background, so I added a cool spiral that we had been doing for a while to tie back into our class. I also added more shapes to add multiple layers of colors to attract the eyes of my audience. I put the copyright on the left side vertical and the album title on the top. I found this very cool font on a font site called “Cruel Sun” by paintblack editions. Then, the name of the musical group, Big Thief, is an alternative indie band. They are my favorite band as of right now. This album is about toxic love, love sickness, and mental illness, which I can relate to, and that’s why I picked it because I love the message of each song.
I added another piece to the inside of the vinyl, which displays the songs included with this album, “Masterpiece. ” Personally, my favorite song out of this bunch is either “Paul” or “Masterpiece.” I wanted to correlate the cover with the textures, such as the yellow circle for the song name list sheet. I used the original album cover picture, latered it with color and texture, and then put compound make and mask on the names of the songs so the text looked textured. I also used a more readable font so the audience could understand. For the next page in the vinyl, this is the liner notes that involve 6 songs with their lyrics, which equals about 1,000+ words, including the background image being the altered original album cover photo with pink undertones and texture added effects. Then the next page is the back cover of the vinyl shield. This includes a correlated spiral design but in a more orange tone. At the bottom is a lyric that speaks to me and describes the vibes of the album.
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OneDrive Link: https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/shared?id=%2Fpersonal%2Fr%5Friley%5Funcg%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2F%5FRachele%20Riley%2Fteaching%2FS25%2FART%20448%2FHannah%20Belk%2FWeek%5F8&listurl=%2Fpersonal%2Fr%5Friley%5Funcg%5Fedu%2FDocuments
I love this style! I am not aware of this artist/band, but just from your interpretation of the album I am intrigued! The pastel, soft color scheme works incredibly well with your hand-drawn, figures. I love the quirky characters and how they are set out through the addition of grainy texture from the flat colors and lines. Awesome work!
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/r_riley_uncg_edu/EqPltMI-oXRAqD9ts2pCLDABxwLcsbY2aoWdyRmEUQQ7Dg?e=Gp3ubT
So far I have been playing with the colors that are prominent in the movie which are blues, white, black. The movie is about being trapped in a video game and trying to escape it. The synopsis for the movie brought up the concept of this techno feel and look to my album cover. This means I had to look into some old arcade game covers for some inspiration. This 8-bit, wireframe look is what I landed upon. For the sleeve I wanted to do a sort of contrast to the black so I went heavy on the white for the cover. There’s another color I will experiment with and its orange as that is proposed in the movie as the antagonists and its not really something found in the previous promotions for the movie. So it’ll be interesting to work with that in alternate versions or mixing it with the blue.
For my studio project, I made an album cover for Paramore’s 2017 album “After Laughter.” Last couple of weeks, I brainstormed and made a few sketches for the project. I made this television goddess roaming in a field of butterflies. For my other idea, I was thinking of using Billie Eilish’s “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go” album, so I created this dark, horrific type of hand coming out of a staircase. I ended up going with the other album choice, and I felt like the sketch was too dark for the theme. For the tv goddess, I wanted to go for this surreal atmosphere, almost dreamlike sense of eerie isolation. However, I felt like I needed to change some things, so I had a different take.
After Laughter explores themes of sadness, anxiety and depression, which is hidden by upbeat sounds and this sort of disillusionment. It seems very vibrant and colorful on the surface, but underneath, there are darker messages. So, I turned the subject into a teenager, around 18-19 years of age. I wanted to make her a bit more expressive and youthful. For my album design, I wanted to combine the grayscale, sketchiness of my drawings into a vibrant, cheerful color. I included different elements such as the butterflies, and balloons to display this sort of cheerfulness and playfulness. But I also included elements like transparency and distortion to convey this idea of masking the truth. I’m a perfectionist by nature, so I took a lot of time in designing the cover, but I still feel like there could be more done.
So far for my studio project, I have been focusing more on editing photos to use for my album cover. I had a hard time at first coming up with the different ideas for what I wanted to do because I wanted to try to come up with something original that I can do that also was close to what the original album cover is. I took some photographic art of the artist and did my best to edit them to make them in my own creative way. I was also able to find a font that was similar to the original album cover and formed it in my own way. I wanted to try to warp the letters in a curve shape around the planet, but I could not figure out a way to make it look good. For the liner notes, I just decided to dig deeper into finding some previous interviews from her back in 2020. I wanted to try and find the responses that were closely related to her musical background and inspiration for her work because I feel that, in my opinion, using those the interior sleeve would be good in theory for a new listener buying the album.
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/r/personal/r_riley_uncg_edu/Documents/_Rachele%20Riley/teaching/S25/ART%20448/Anthony%20Valentine/Week%208/vinyl.pdf?csf=1&web=1&e=junLz4