The Art of Cover Design

May 20, 2008

Welcome, new visitor! My name is Ari, the man behind Aries9. Here I share my thoughts on music and life, so you can get to know me and my music. Thanks for visiting!

The other day I was able to take advantage of a CD giveaway event hosted by a radio station.

You see, radios receive thousands of CDs. Most of them don’t go on the air — most of them are unlistened. This station chose to give those CDs away, instead of just trashing them (though most still ended up in recycle bin).

Thousands of CDs from bands you’ve never heard of. I must admit, my personal musical taste tends to hover somewhere around “artsy major label acts” — so I’m not a connoisseur of independent acts. Which is a strange place to be, considering I’m an indie act myself — but that’s a whole another post.
Anyway, thousands of free CDs of acts you’ve never ever heard of. So this is a total shopping-by-cover here. In addition to scoring like a dozen cool CDs (out of like 150 or so I listened and returned to the pile), I made some interesting observations.

First of all, conventions do exist in jacket designs. In most genres.

A blues guitar player? Gotta include a photo of vintage/beat-up looking guitar on the cover. A country act has a slick, sunny image, even if the artist is not donning the stereotypical hat and boots. Folk? Earthy impression, quiet and understated design, maybe acoustic guitars. Latin acts, swing acts — they all do communicate visually what kind of music contained within their packaging.

Not so obvious is us art rockers.

For example, let’s take this example:

If I tell you that that’s the cover of an album by an act you’ve never heard of (maybe it’s a self-titled debut of a band “Binaural”) — will you guess what kind of music that is?

Not really. It feels mysterious and serious and artsy. I may guess that it’s a metal band, or at least an aggressive rock band with some dark lyrics.

The answer — Pearl jam — is neither. Well, PJ does contain some darkness, but I don’t think of them as dark as what this cover image represents. That eye-like center is downright disturbing to me.

Here is mine. I love my cover. It’s dark, mysterious, serious, iconic, artsy — but does that tell you what kind of music it is? Not really. One thing I did do right is that the band name and the album title do give more clues. This is definitely a rock band — maybe emo. Not metal — it doesn’t communicate that sort or edge.

So you see, cover design has a very important role. And that role is not to grab your attention when you see it amidst thousands of other CDs — that’s virtually impossible these days. Rather, what the design needs to do is to communicate what music is contained inside. This is not the place to buck the conventions here — it won’t do you any good to have a picture of pointy guitars on the cover if you’re a bluegrass act. It’s simply misleading. You simply need to work within the conventions established within your genre, while accentuating your individuality.

I must say, I came away feeling all right about my CD’s design. I know there are several places where I would do differently next time, but all in all it’s a competent job of representing my music visually.

They say “don’t judge the book by the cover.” Well, this is an instance where anyone should be able to at least figure out the content from the cover. If you’re a musician, do keep that in mind. If you’re a listener — try shopping by cover once in a while. It’s fun and full of surprises.

Filed under: Industry |