Response for my Bajan Style album artwork

A few days ago I showed Cover Drive my Bajan Style album artwork on Twitter as a direct message and they replied with:

Analysis of my magazine promotion of Bajan Style album

By looking at other magazine promos of albums, I think I have followed the typical conventions. This is because I have kept the Cover Drive iconography of the text and it also fits with the genre of music.

It is common to use the album cover as the main image and centred in the advertisement, which is what I decided to do. The advertisement is eye catching as it is colourful with large fonts. The use of the record label logo in the bottom corner shows a typical convention used in the advertisements and a website to find out more about the artist. The type usually seems to be the same font on the album cover, which is why I kept the font that I used for Bajan Style to write the rest of the text.

Construction of my magazine promotion for Bajan Style album

 



How I constructed this:

1. I created a new page on Photoshop to fit the dimensions of a magazine advert.
2. I then used the original edited image of my album cover (without the text) and copied and pasted it into the new page. I considered the positioning of my image and the artist to be centre of the page. This is because then this way the audience could be drawn straight to the artist. That is why I used the bright colours to attract the audience's attention.
3. After this I used the same type that I used on my album cover onto the magazine advert and copy and pasted the 'Cover Drive' from my album cover.
4. The text at the bottom of the advert I had to make sure that it was positioned well as the first few times the text would either be too big, too small or too much on one side. I wanted to make sure that there was enough space between the texts as I didn't want all the text to be cramped into one small space and ot make sure the record label logo fit in correctly.

Bajan Style album artwork

After designing a few album artworks on Photoshop CS6, I have decided which one I would like to use as my final piece. We had to keep in mind certain conventions that had to be used within our album artwork package:

• Artist iconography
• Artist branding
• Typography
• Genre conventions for your artist
• Synthesis with music video

Here are a few that I had designed (uncompleted) before:

Image 2

This is the final piece I have decided to use for my front cover:

Here are the steps of how I created the front cover and why I chose these decisions:

1. Firstly, I started with a texture I had saved to use as my fixed background
2. Imported a photo onto Photoshop that I wanted to use as my front cover image
3. Cut out the background of my image, changed the size to fit the texture and the dragged it to the texture
4. Tested around with colours using curves and then adding another texture on top and blended it to give it the yellow an blue tint
5. After this I wasn't too happy with the colours so I added a PSD, which brightened up the colours as well as giving a bit more of a blue tint
6. Adding the text I used Cover Drive's album Bajan Style and cut out the text of 'Cover Drive' and then cut it and pasted it to mine
7. I then added in the text of Bajan Style

I decided to use this as my front cover as I feel it fits the conventions of the music style as it has the influence of pop culture and Caribbean culture which is shown through the colours. I particularly tried to include a blue and yellow tint to the background, which represents the Bajan colours. I chose this design rather than the first 2 images as I felt that this look more professional and fit the conventions a bit more than the first 2 images. I felt the first 2 images had too much based on the Caribbean culuture whereas the front cover I chose has a bit more balance between the pop culture and the Caribbean culture, which is shown through the use of colours and the flag. I decided to keep the type of 'Cover Drive' on my front cover as this style of font is Cover Drive's iconography, therefore I wanted to keep this.

Inside:

I decided to use a black background of the CD print with the text being in white and yellow. This is because I tested with other colours but they did not look as professional as the black did. I also did not want to over power the colours in my album package as my front and back cover are both bright coloured.

Back cover:

Magazine album promotions

Here are a few images of magazine album promotions:

 

 

 

 

 

 By looking at all these magazine promotions for the artist's album, it is clear that the conventions are different to a normal album artwork package. This changes as more information is added for the advertisment. I have noticed that the main photo of the advertisment is not always the same image as the front cover of the album. For example the 2nd image of the Rihanna advertisment as well as the Beyonce one. The image takes up the whole page with the details at the bottom.

Typical conventions used in these promotions:

• Name of artist/album
• Release date
• Featuring songs
• Where they can buy the album
• A website of where people can find out more about the artist

Typography

Typography - The art or process of setting and arranging types and printing from them

In class we were looking at typography and created a few ideas on what we would do for our ancillary tasks. Here is a sketch I did that I thought would go with my album artwork.

A sketch of what I thought I could have on my front cover

A litte bit of help to help us decide what type to use

I found this useful as now I know what type I would like on my front cover as this can portray to the audience what style of music the album is about. For example by having Cover Drive bigger than Bajan Style shows that Cover Drive is the band and Bajan Style is the name of the album. There is a wide stroke, which emphasises the point of the band being called Cover Drive and to stand out.