Digipack front cover

As for A2 we started to study the media music industry as part of or course work we had to look at album covers and create one, after have had some Photoshop lesson fro beginner.

Firstly you need to have a general understanding of Photoshop and of the music industry, choosing a defined genre.

Once you’ve chosen you genre you use pen and paper to write down all the thoughts that describe and represent it specifically, anything could be valid so don’t get shy just write everything that come into you head (spider graphs are better to have a more detailed research and well displayed).

Once you came out with a final idea you can start creating, with the use of Photoshop, opening a new document and be sure you typed 12cm per 12cm and 300 resolution. It is really important to get those figures accurate, to obtain a high quality album cover and the right measurements straight away to income any problems later on.

From here is your imagination playing to create a unique cover, however there can be different type of genre of music, this means that it would chance depending on the chosen one.

If we talk about a single artist you may or not want to include the protagonist in the front cover, same for a band. It could be a symbol or logo that represents the band or artist.

Why is it so important to make front covers?

It is a method of recognition, you can underline some essential aspect of the artist, for example organic or not, single or band. It can help promoting the object by emphasising the type of audience and few features that can create a USP for the artist, for example if they collaborate with some important record label or maybe the look or style.

In any album cover you could buy, they will have something in common, like a picture, the name of the artist or band and the album name, a code bar, record label name or logo as well as a playlist.

For my album cover house/soul music inspired me, and I decided to use my own picture to make it more personal.

The purpose of my album is to represent a solo artist, plus describe what the song or the whole album is going to talk about.

The picture represent a well-styled girl surrounded my smoke; the whole was taken with a blue filter adding a modern aspect to picture. I chose this picture, as I know that blue and red lights are the trends of the moment as you can find them in many music videos, so I would have started with a understanding and knowledge of trends and the music industry.

As it was own picture the post editing was already accurately made, making the process a lot quicker and easier.

The next step was to choose a name for the artist, the title of the album or single plus the font.

In this case I decided to copy the name of an unknown artist and one of his song that would fit the character and the whole theme, the name is Mako and the title Smoke Filled Room, for the font I chose something simple and straight forward but that would add a bit of character, Bodoni 72 Smallcaps, I have used it before so I knew already the final result.

Finally to add something modern and different I have cut three little triangle from the original picture, picking three different places and their different tones of blue, then I lined them up on the top left cona, and my front cover was completed.

That third element helped me to make more creative and interesting

To complete the work I blended all the different layers making a single one, you need to be 100% sure that you happy with it cause once you blend all the layer together you won’t be able to edit them anymore.

That was just a practise for a front cover, so there is lots of room for improvement.