Due weekly on Sundays. Responses to others’ posts due Tuesdays.
Week 10 — Assignment “Album Design Refinement”
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 refine digital design elements, text composition, typographic settings, and image systems. This week you will refine your design for the printed album covers. Next week you will develop a time-based media application for the album art system.
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Discuss:
- Discuss your Week 10 studio project progress (200 word minimum) as a comment below. What specific typography/design questions do you have which would be helpful for me to demonstrate in the Week 11 video demo? Reply to at least two other people’s posts (below) by Tuesday.
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Studio:
- Refine the typography and design for the album cover (front and back) and interior record sleeve (front and back) for print production—for a selected musical artist/musical group’s specific album.
Dimensions are 12.375 in x 12.375 in (Vinyl 12″ LP) - Design a spine for your album cover.
Dimensions for a single album cover sleeve are variable in width, but you can use this dimension it at 0.25 in (w) x 12.375 in (h) - Design a two-sided circular label for the vinyl record—Side A and Side B.
Dimensions are 3.937 in (100 mm) outer diameter and 0.28 in (7.14-mm) hole in the center. - You can expand your layout and print design sequence further, if you wish—into a gatefold structure, or into a separate music poster, etc. Any extra elements are welcome, and yours to express and explore!
- As a reminder, the text components of your design include:
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.
I do not have a specific question about typography or designs for this week, but I looked at my one from last week and decided to redesign some of it. The first thing I decided to redesign was the back covers of the cd/vinyl. I feel like the typeface I was originally using was too busy and harder to read. Before in my mind I would think the typeface would have to be the same throughout the whole design but the more examples I looked at I realized that is not true. So I switch the design and made it simpler. I switched the track list font to another blocky type font but had more kerning in between each letter.I had also decided to change the vinyl design and make it completely black and white the the accent being on the spine, the color green that is use throughout their other designs. I never realized how skinny the spines are for vinyls until now. I do think adding the spine really tied it all together.I kept the CD designs similar to week 8 with the theme of the original cover green,gray, black, and white.
Overall I like my new design compared to the first.
New Design:
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/r/personal/r_riley_uncg_edu/Documents/_Rachele%20Riley/teaching/S25/ART%20448/Jayla%20Miles/Week%2010?csf=1&web=1&e=kCcOnF
Using different fonts is always a good idea for sure! Especially if they will be different sizes, some become harder to read the smaller it becomes like serif fonts.
Hi Jayla,
I like this new design that you made for your vinyl; I think the shade of green you used to work very well with what you’re doing, and the typography is very interesting. I also never realized how skinny the vinyl spines are.
I did a lot experimenting with changing up the track list and design of the actual vinyl disc. I really liked my original album cover design from week 8 so I kept most of that the same, although I did put a low opacity texture image over it that tones down the brightness and makes it look more similar in material to an actual vinyl cover. I also moved around the artist name and album title to a different location that makes it more unique. The only other major change I did was redoing the backside of the cover and adding in a background that fit the style of the cover along with a semi-transparent block in the middle for the song list so that they didn’t get mixed up in the background too much. Going forward though I’d definitely like to mess around with the typography a bit more, because currently I mostly just use a basic font with an outline and I feel like I could take that further to make it stand out more.
For this week’s work I used some of my ideas from last week to improve upon. I made the front page as I did in last week but messed with the color intensity. Then for the back page, I used a page that lists all song names and added the copyright label to the bottom. For the spine, I did a gradient between the two colors and added the title Melodrama and the artist Lorde. I made 4 pages for the inside sleeves. The first is a two-page spread I worked on last week that gives information for all the songs in the album and this time I added in an optical alignment and made the blocks of text go down in a diagonal line. Then the other two inside pages are images with lyrics on them, I enjoy the green light one since the text blocks made a circle around the hand. Then for the circle on the vinyl, the top of it was a simple cover with a handwritten title that I cut out from a signature that Lorde did. While the back of the vinyl has chunks of text from the songs and turns in different ways that overlap. So far I do not have any questions on things that could be helpful for next week’s project. Any questions I had this week were answered so I can’t think of anything to ask for help with currently. I do think it would be nice to see the final product of what this would all look like together or what the final outcome should show all laid out.
Hello Skye,
I like how the text is arranged and how you put everything together with your album cover. I think you adding certain elements really bring it together and make it feel like more of an original idea.
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/r/personal/r_riley_uncg_edu/Documents/_Rachele%20Riley/teaching/S25/ART%20448/Kayla%20Stiles/Week%2010?csf=1&web=1&e=cQ4ILV
For my album project, I decided to create two different designs. I really liked the styles I created, and didn’t want to throw one out over the other, so I worked on both of them in tangent. The first design started with a digitally drawn background I did in Procreate, with bold blacks and reds. There is a rough, splattered, spray-painted texture to the image that I figured fit well with the grunge theme I was going for. I continued the same color scheme throughout, layering the typography with different values and strokes while also experimenting with the demon-monkey icon I drew. The fonts I worked with were Beelzebrush BB and Beelzebrush Black BB. They have an overall hand-drawn feel to them with rough, bold edges. For the second design, I used the same fonts but in different ways. The layout and typography of this version is slightly more crisp and clean in my opinion, but the extra edge is added with the photographic, industrial brick of the background. I experimented with different layers of transparency, making the graphics of the demon-monkey more subtle. Throughout this process, I added in the silhouettes of the original Demon Days cover as a subtle homage to the original, as it is my all time favorite album. I really like how these turned out!
So for this week, I planned to refine my spelling, add side an and b for track list and the front and back of the vinyl itself, add a spine, and any other color schemes I wanted to include. I accomplished all of this and it was super fun! I enjoy this project a lot and looking forward to future projects with these new skills learned. For spelling, I spelled thief wrong for “Big Thief,” thanks to professor Riley, she pointed it out. ‘I’ always go before ‘e’ apparently and my brain did not comprehend this. For the side an and b for the track list, I separated the album track list in half and put them on two different pages and added my spiral in the background. I learned that the most popular songs of the track list go on side an and the less popular on side b which I found interesting. I also wanted a different color scheme but similar colors to the cover to tie it all together.
For the spine, I looked up some examples and got the. information for the spin specifically for the album ‘masterpiece’ by Big Thief. For example on the spine, you need the artist, title of the album, and label, and format. I included all these things I researched and used the find Skia that I have been using as my second besides my display font. I also tied it in with the color of pink because I thought that would be color popping spine. Along with the side B vinyl, I included a simple tagline name ‘masterpiece,’ and ‘Big Thief,’ to keep it simple since everything else that I had was very detailed and textured. It was fun!
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one drive link:
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/shared?id=%2Fpersonal%2Fr%5Friley%5Funcg%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2F%5FRachele%20Riley%2Fteaching%2FS25%2FART%20448%2FHannah%20Belk%2FWeek%5F10%21&listurl=%2Fpersonal%2Fr%5Friley%5Funcg%5Fedu%2FDocuments
Okay, so for my project, I refined the front and the back of my album covers, as well as added a sleeve and some vinyl covers. I liked how much album covers turned out from Week 8, so I felt like I didn’t want to go and change too much. What I mainly focused on was make the typography stand out more, and look a little bit more professional and integrated. The typography was looking a little too flat, so I went ahead and darkened the colors, as well as added some shadow to them. For the back of the cover, I wanted the balloons to be a little bit more cohesive with the butterflies on the front cover. I added some opacity effects to make them more faded out.
For the sleeve, I wanted to keep it simple and readable, so I put the typography in the center. I felt like just the typography alone felt a little bland, so I added different colored butterflies on the top. Lastly, for the vinyls, I had to improvise a little. I wanted to do more for the vinyls, but my computer unfortunately broke over the weekend. I had to use an old computer for the designs (which was absolutely atrocious,) but I was able to get it done. I included some more fading butterflies in a pattern, and for the back, I wanted to have a little bit of contrast. After Laughter, again, is fun and bubbly at first. However, there are underlying themes of depression, anxiety, and stress. I wanted to play around with that like I did with the front and back covers, so I did a colorful front, and a more pencil/sketch based drawing for the back.
I had a little bit of trouble designing the vinyl covers. For the little small hole in the center of the vinyl (where there is supposed to be a cutout), I didn’t know how to cut the hole out. I had to make it the color white to give the illusion of the hole being cut out. I tried using pathfinder, but I have no clue if I was doing it incorrectly or not.
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/r_riley_uncg_edu/EnZWLzp4QxFErCQNpkTWjyQBHzPsApreewcw8DsOUz-vcA?e=6qbPWg
Hello! Your album cover is really nice, adding depth to your butterflies really helps make it feel like they are moving. Neat touch on using a gradient to bring lots of colors together onto the background.
Hey Clint!
I love your choice of album by Paramore. I also enjoyed your use of textures with fonts and the background of your design. The pastel colors really give Paramore and I appreciate this cohesiveness. You did a great job!
In my week 10 studio project, I decided to refine my vinyl design by doing something more creative with the typography on the cover of the album. I wanted to warp the letters so that they were on an arc on the planet and the collar of the shirt. I felt like this could be good symmetry and was more creative than just placing the letters on the album cover. Then for the back of the album cover, I decided to position the font of the Side A and Side B songs on equal sides of each other instead of on top of each other. And then for the inside cover I switched the sides of the letters and the image of her on opposite sides just to experiment a little with which did I prefer. I started to create the album spine with just a simple red font for the title and artist and I made the spine color a similar color to some of the colors on the planet to emulate the pattern of the planet. For the vinyls, I just added the vinyl to it but for the middle I made a circular design similar to the planet in the album cover.
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/r/personal/r_riley_uncg_edu/Documents/_Rachele%20Riley/teaching/S25/ART%20448/Anthony%20Valentine/Week%2010/Refined%20Vinyl.pdf?csf=1&web=1&e=4mS9dI
This week I went ahead and changed my color theme because I wanted to see how it would look like if I used orange instead of blue across the project. I updated some fonts to make it more readable but still pixelated. I continued working with using the Daft Punk’s robot suits in the cover arts by editing them to look like video game characters from the 8-bit era. I am really loving the orange more than the blue and I think it helps bring the feeling of intensity which the soundtrack gives off in my opinion. I think there’s still lot more room to play with the typography but overall I am liking the new direction my cover art is heading towards and will explore figuring out how to layout my text in more unique ways. I guess something that would be good to know is what is a good ratio of fonts to have per design layout? How much is too much?
https://uncg-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/r/personal/r_riley_uncg_edu/Documents/_Rachele%20Riley/teaching/S25/ART%20448/Gerardo%20Gomez-San%20Juan/Week-10?csf=1&web=1&e=bmVLVY
I really like how it is turning out! There is a nice theme between all the pages and I like how you used the images put onto the vinyl disc. Blue and orange work great together and the pixilated looks interesting and fits the music. I think you could add more linear text on the pages where its at the bottom on the black rectangle, since you could fit more in but it also looks nice right now too. Good job!
I think that my week 10 artwork is going pretty well, I used one of my designs from the experimentation last week on the front cover and revised the back cover to be more cohesive and match better with the color scheme. I like the darker colors of the front cover and wanted to tie in the darkest red/burgundy color from the star design I made into the back cover as well. I put the same ocean design on the spine and a small font for the album name and artist name. For the sleeve, I have been enjoying repetitive words so I did the artists first name repeated over the entire plane, and then some liner notes for the other side with the lyrics to some of the songs and a plain background. I want to make sure the sleeve is not too busy and distract from the album cover itself.
Something I would like to see in the week 11 video is how to do pop art-style work. I see a lot of cool album covers with that look but whenever I try to make it myself, it looks blocky and doesn’t have the same feeling as some of the work I see online.
I really like how your front cover connects to the spine so well with a lot of those elements and then the star is repeated through out from the front and back page. I do think simplicity if good but maybe the liner notes need something more to them rather than a white background with just words, you could possibly break them up into columns or mess with something to make a background. But overall I really like how it is going, the color scheme is on point and everything seems very cohesive.
Hey Aniston!
I did the same thing when using my designs from past weeks. I think this is smart and innovative. I love your choice of deep, bold and dark colors. Great work this week!