R+P Post 10: Album covers that have inspired and influenced my ideas

During our research, our group looked at a variety of album covers to find ones that influenced our ideas for our own album cover.

Here are some of our most influential:

FRONT

BACK

The cover for the debut studio album Lungs by the British indie rock band Florence and the Machine denotes the lead artist in front of a curtained backdrop and colourful flowers. The front of the album cover keeps with the conventions by displaying the lead artist, and by having the name of the band and the album. For a debut album, we believed this was important as there is not yet an audience to associate the name with the music, so showing the artist on the album is important to begin establishing a connection for the audience between their image and their music. We agreed that for our upcoming artist, we would follow these conventions for similar reasons.

We also liked the use of a uni-coloured green backdrop and pale coloured flowers to establish a colour palate with this artist; we thought this simplistic design successfully conveyed the heartwarming mood of the album, and we discussed ways in which we would use our pastel colour palate in our album cover to convey our band identity.

The back of the cover contains conventions of album covers such as a track list, a barcode, copyright information and logos for record labels. We thought this was important to add to the back of our own album.

FRONT

BACK

The album cover for London Calling by English punk band The Clash has a grayscale photograph of the guitarist swinging his guitar to the ground in a performance to smash it. This is an iconic image and perfectly conveys the rebellious message of the band and their music. Although our group are not thinking of a rebellious, 'angry' tone for our own band, we really liked the simplicity of having a photo of someone performing be the album cover and what their look when seen live says about their image. We also liked the live performance aesthetic because it is a convention for independent artists to portray themselves performing live on their album covers, as it demonstrates that they are all about 'the music'. This is a convention we would like to portray for our band, and this cover influenced us to consider whether using an image of our artist performing would be a successful way to convey this.