Overview

Record sleeves are a way music artists visually communicate to music fans. They can be used to represent emotions you feel from listening to a certain type of music. Every genre has a theme and by using graphic design we can display the experience of music visually.

Reggae Album Cover

Brief

From the songs listed, I must design a new album cover for one of these genre starting songs. To make a revolutionary album cover by taking inspiration from the genre’s past and other designers. This is to be achieved by using either cutouts, collage, drawings or another hands-on approach.

Planning

Starting my research by looking at the different themes that each music genre has. Each genre has a different feel and when creating something as powerful as an album cover I must consider my options.

I decided that, before I chose the album cover I would redesign, I created moodboards exploring the genres and the bands associated with them. This led to more knowledge about the subject matter and allowed for an insight into this brief. I became passionate about making this redesign professional as though you I was designing it for real distribution.

Further research into the genres and imagery alongside them pointed me towards the reggae genre. The bright, enthusiastic look you have some looking at this array of colour and passion . Pursuing this it leads me to these mesmerising illustrations. I began sketching ideas from images on my moodboards that I thought were particularly inspiring. They were simplistic yet said everything they needed to. I thought this style would look great on an album cover. Colours that I thought would work really well with the album and the feel I was going for.

Development

Then I adapted several illustrations I liked to create my own version which I felt looked better and suited the theme. This illustration of a heart/ instruments has a lot of potential to be visually beautiful. Taking this illustration and somehow turning it into an album cover was a tricky task but one I believe accomplished perfectly.

Final Design

By using a strong, bright, colourful palette you can see the genre from a distance, which was an objective for me as I find some albums difficult to tell what style of music they are.

Alongside that, by adding curved lines growing out of the heart gives the look of organic and musical. I wanted the illustration to be obvious yet symbolic. Research showed how beautiful and powerful this genre is and trying to portray that became easier the more passionate I became throughout the design process.

The instruments used in the final design are of a speaker, bass guitar, keyboard, drums and a cymbal. These instruments are used in the creation of reggae music and seeing as this is the album that made it known I felt as though it was appropriate. By keeping the instruments black and white it stands out on the red background, making it a focal point for buyers.

Conclusion

My final design gave me the ability to use my strengths and some of my weaknesses. The fact that we were not allowed to do the final design on the computer was a bit of a challenge for me because in my past I have created something similar to this using the Adobe software and the finished result looked professional. My worry here was that by me using handheld media that it would not look professional and a little messy. Looking back now I believe the way I designed the cover allowed me to use my other talents with pen illustration and craft knife skills. This brief has helped me overcome my fears with non-computer based briefs.

To conclude I really enjoyed this brief. It took my passion for design and love of music and combined them. My favorite brief in the picture, symbol, icon module and encourage you to use it next year.

Sketchbook work available upon request